Dark Matter: the gripping ghost story from the author of WAKENHYRST

Product Information

The Book Smugglers » Blog Archive » The Half-Year Mark: Best Books of 2011 (so far) June 18, 2011 at 12:03 am

Welcome to the home of Chronicles of Ancient Darkness!

Paver was in the middle of research for another adult novel – Wakenhyrst, about a lonely child growing up in the middle of the marshes in Edwardian Suffolk – so she had to put the germ of an idea for what would become Viper’s Daughter aside. But she’s no stranger to letting ideas percolate until they find their time: while studying biochemistry at Oxford in the late 70s, she found herself getting increasingly interested in writing and attempted a Mills & Boon. “It was absolute rubbish. I was so arrogant. I had complete contempt for Mills & Boon and thought it must be easy, so wrote it in three weeks and sent it in. Of course it got rejected.” One of the underlying themes of the story is hostility both imagined and real. The whole story is in the context of a diary kept by our hero and so we get only his opinion, his viewing of the situation but Paver enables us to see his mistakes and misunderstandings and misrepresentations because, when all else is said and done, he is an honest man. The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness tell the story of Torak, a twelve-year-old boy who is clanless, and his friends Renn and Wolf. The main story arc revolves around Torak and his quest to defeat the Soul Eaters, a group of evil clan mages who seek out to destroy all life in the forest in which they live. The books are set in prehistoric Europe during the New Stone Age.From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher." A blood-curdling ghost story, evocative not just of icy northern wastes but of a mind turning in on itself.” Paver is the mistress of suspense” agrees Amanda Craig in her review of children’s books for Halloween in The Times. “The strangeness that humans can suffer from when exposed to the Arctic wilderness is brilliantly exploited in this period piece.” Author Michelle Paver was another wonder to me. Her knowledge of life in the Arctic is so extensive I had to find out more about her and read that Michelle traveled to Finland, Greenland, Sweden, Norway, Arctic Canada, and the Carpathian Mountains. She has slept on reindeer skins, swum with wild killer whales, and gotten nose to nose with polar bears and wolves to research her books. That explained why her book was so realistic and believable. Although technically a ghost story, the real horror for me is the sense of creeping dread and isolation and loneliness as the last man left in the endless night of an arctic camp. Most chilling of all is the man’s horror at contemplating the afterlife should he perish there and become a ghost himself – not just a winter of endless night alone, but an eternity.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver | Waterstones

My second trip on one of Michelle Paver’s icy cold ghost stories, the first being Dark Matter. I loved that one, and this one proved to be just as good. Her fen, “alive with vast skeins of geese… the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia”, casts “a dim green subaqueous glimmer” over her story; Maud, poised between superstition and religion, is inexorably drawn to it. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. “‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.” Like all good heroines, Maud doesn’t listen. What do I mean by wrong? Well I don’t mean ghosts. Not in the sense of disembodied spirits, I don’t believe in them. […] But energy, now. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so isn’t it at least possible that some kind of energy—perhaps magnetic, or even some force of emotion—may have lingered here for years? And perhaps—perhaps there’s something about me that makes me a sort of physical medium for that energy: like a battery, or a lightning rod? Author's press release (8 August 2009). "Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Sells A Million Copies!". Booktrade.info. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 . Retrieved 6 February 2011. {{ cite web}}: |author= has generic name ( help)This is pacey, readable historical fiction with a good sense of period and atmosphere. I enjoyed Pearce’s narration, and the one-upmanship type of relationship with his brother adds an interesting dimension to the expedition dynamics. However, I never submitted sufficiently to Paver’s spell to find anything particularly scary. I’ll try again with her other ghost story, Dark Matter, about an Arctic expedition from the same time period. Paver has written a similar book to this one called Thin Air, cold snowy horror, ghosts & isolation etc, so I was worried this one would feel too samey for me to really appreciate it, but boy was I wrong! ⁠ In the summer of 1994, psychologist Daniel Hill buys a rustic farmhouse nestled in the rolling hills of West Virginia.