Dark Matter

Title: Dark Matter - A Ghost Story
Author: Michelle Paver
Published: 2011 by Orion Books
Genre: Ghost story
Pages: 252 + extra bits


Last one today, I swear! The SO bought this in London and told me to read it as it's proper scary. Pfft, I thought, how scary could it really be?

Really fucking scary, actually!

It's the year 1937, and a small expedition is leaving from London to the Norwegian islands of Spitsbergen, known these days as Svalbard. The story is told through the journal of Jack Miller, a poor man with big dreams and skills to use the wireless. The goal is to spend a year in the Arctic studying nature and weather. But it's hard for dwellers of London to understand just how cold it gets, and how dark and long the northern winter can be. How lonely and empty it can get with no-one else for miles around, and how terrifying it is when suddenly you're not alone anymore.

I read Dark Matter pretty much in one sitting. It's been years since the last time I did that! I didn't want to put the book down as I was pulled in to the mystery. I haven't been this properly scared since I read James L. Grant's On the Banks of Lethe, my favourite horror book. This has got to be my second-favourite.


   For the first time since reaching Gruhuken, I thought about the men who were here before us; who built this hut from logs dragged up from the beach, and lived through the 'dark time', and then left, leaving nothing but a tin plate and a blizzard of bones.
   What must it have been like? No wireless, maybe not even a companion; at any rate only one, in a hut this size. To know that you're the only human being in all this wilderness.