A Review By Rev David Boulton

I am almost inordinately fond of ghost stories, but in a long career of reading them and writing them (I began reading ghost stories in earnest when I was about ten or so) I have only come across two which made me feel genuinely uneasy: The House on The Borderland, By William Hope Hodgson, and now Dark Matter by Michelle Paver.

The Observer newspaper literary critic wrote that it is a test of a good ghost story that the reader feels panic when reading it in bed at midnight. I found the story sufficiently eerie to give rise to a feeling of unease when sitting reading in my chair on a summer’s evening. The suspense, and sense of something not quite right, something uncanny, builds slowly and inexorably from the start.

Ms Paver wonderfully conjures the frozen wastes of the arctic circle, the oppressive nature of the polar night with its strangeness, its dawnless days and the utter, bewildering silence of the barren, icy wilderness. This masterly evocation of place and atmosphere contributes to the steady building of suspense until this reader’s nerves were almost at screaming point.

Jack is the obsessed narrator with a chip on his shoulder. Dark Matter is the tale of a lurking vengeful presence that tries to drive him away, from Gruhuken, where he is forced to man a weather observation station alone because of misfortunes that have befallen his fellow members of an Arctic expedition. Ms Paver records Jack’s growing terror in his own, increasingly fearful words, with compassion and empathy. She makes us believe that Jack himself really believes everything he records, but at the same time leaves open the possibility that his enforced solitude is actually driving him mad. Not since The Turn of The Screw has any writer achieved this feat so well.

Read it, I dare you.

The Rev’d David R. Boulton

Bishop’s Curate, Southern diocese, Free Church of England.