The iceman cometh

     You have plenty of time to clear your TBR piles to make room for this book as it won't be published until October, but make room you should as Michelle Paver's Dark Matter is a ghost story of terrific menace written with consummate skill.

     Taking the form of the diary of physicist Jack Miller who joins a scientific expedition to the Arctic in 1937, it tells of what befalls the small group when they land at Gruhuken on Spitsbergen (Svalbard) and prepare to overwinter.

   Jack is a loner, a man without family or friends. His academic ambitions have been sacrificed to the need to make a living, but his job as a clerk leaves him bored and dissatisfied, so when he gets the chance to be the meteorologist and wireless operator in a team which will study High Arctic biology, geology and ice dynamics, he accepts this new beginning and determines to go where it leads him.

   The group make camp in August when there's almost constant daylight, and the vastness of the place, its solitude and remoteness, touch Jack and lift his spirits. He comes into his own and relishes the task ahead, despite the curious wariness and unease of the Norwegian skipper and crew who will shortly bid farewell to the men for the winter, and a strange feeling as of something sinister around the part of their camp where once stood an abandoned trappers' hut.

   But it's when Autumn draws perpetual darkness down and illness forces Jack's companions to leave while he stays on alone to man the instruments and take the survey readings, that the unsettling sights and sounds he has experienced become inexplicable, truly frightening ones. Ever rational, Jack refuses to believe that Gruhuken could be haunted - such a notion defies logic, and surely if there is 'anything' there at all it is only some kind of echo, a 'place memory', which he, a man of sensitivity and acute perception has happened to pick up?

   I can give you no more of the plot than that, but Michelle Paver has drawn the strands together in a tightly written story of stark contrasts: a book of dark deeds in a white wilderness, of the unthinkable becoming horribly manifest, of the strength of companionship and the desolation of being utterly alone. It is genuinely chilling, perfectly paced and fittingly resolved, and with its very fine focus it is an intensely atmospheric, concentratedly gripping novel.

Comments

[adele geras]

Can't wait for this! Thanks for the heads-up, Cornflower.

[Linda Gillard]

Just my cup of iced tea! Thanks for a great review.

[Jennifer Dee]

I like the sound of this one. I looked on Amazon but it hasn't been released yet.

[Dark Puss]

What do those of us with no TBR piles do until this is published?

[LizF]

Sounds like a combination of The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding and Dan Simmons' The Terror but with Michele Paver's own special touch. Definitely one to look out for when it is published.
Thanks for the review.

[Cornflower]

Make a note to get hold of a copy in October.

[Cornflower]

Yes, I was reminded of Thomas Cave as I read it, though it's very different, but they would make good 'companion' reads.

[Cornflower]

It won't be out until October, Jennifer, but I'll flag it up again then.

[Annabel (gaskella)]

It sounds my kind of book. Last year I read a slightly similar sounding one called Cold Earth by Sarah Moss which followed a group of archeologists on Spitzbergen haunted by Viking ghosts, but it also had a dystopian element to it - I really enjoyed it.

[Mr Cornflower]

Cornflower passed her copy on to me. A lovely, spooky read, and a remarkable book!

[Claire (Paperback Reader)]

I think it will perfect Hallowe'en reading! *Makes notes of it*