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A Dark Matter

by Peter Straub (Goodreads Author)

2.9 of 5 stars 2.90 · rating details · 1,520 ratings · 303 reviews

The incomparable master of horror and suspense returns with a powerful, brilliantly terrifying novel that redefines the genre in original and unexpected ways.

The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritua...more

Hardcover, 397 pages

Published February 9th 2010 by Doubleday

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Mar 03, 2010 Nancy Oakes rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

You'll see 4 stars, but it's really 3.5 rounded up.

It's like this. You will like or dislike this book depending on your expectations. If you're expecting the kind of hackle-raising horror that is often associated with this author, you may be disappointed. If you are expecting a slam-bang, linear narrative in which all is revealed, you probably won't want to read it. It is really not so much a novel of horror but more of a look at the whole concept of the connectivity of good and evil, so if you...more You'll see 4 stars, but it's really 3.5 rounded up.

It's like this. You will like or dislike this book depending on your expectations. If you're expecting the kind of hackle-raising horror that is often associated with this author, you may be disappointed. If you are expecting a slam-bang, linear narrative in which all is revealed, you probably won't want to read it. It is really not so much a novel of horror but more of a look at the whole concept of the connectivity of good and evil, so if you come at it from that angle, you will definitely get much more out of it than if you think you're getting say, a book along the lines of Straub's Julia or If You Could See Me Now.

If you're willing to put in the time and you can deal with a different approach to writing than you're used to seeing with this author, then it just might work out to be a good read. The key here is that this is not a passive book -- meaning that the reader has work to do here as well.

The crux of this novel hinges on events that happened in the late 60s in Madison, Wisconsin. A group of high-school friends meet a strange and charismatic guru-ish figure named Spencer Mallon, and find themselves held in thrall by his teachings. With the exception of the narrator of this story, Lee Harwell, all of the kids go off with Mallon to be part of a ritual he's conducting at that time, accompanied by three other people, also followers of Mallon. What happened at that ritual is what Harwell, later in life, wants to determine. His wife, also Lee (but called "the Eel") was there, but over all of this time, has refused to let him in on the details. Little by little he gathers the story in pieces from all of the various participants with two exceptions: one person who was suspected, even in the 60s, of being a serial killer, and a friend of his who went missing afterwards. The book blurbs (and most reviews of this book) note that this is done in a "Rashomon" style, which is an apt description of how Harwell is able to glean an insight into not only what happened, but why things turned out as they did for each and every one of Mallon's groupies later in life.

This is a work of metafiction, in which the author (Lee Harwell) is gathering information and retelling the story for a book he is writing. This sent up a flag for me -- can we really trust this guy in relating this information to the readers -- meaning, is Harwell a reliable narrator here? Also, this is mostly a character, rather than plot-driven novel, since each of the people involved have different aspects of the story to relate. While this is a cool approach, I was left with a sense of something lacking in most of the people involved that would provide more depth to this novel, with one exception, the kid who turned out to be the serial killer. Hmm. I was also happy to find Tim Underhill mentioned in this novel, since he's been one of my favorite characters since the Koko years.

Overall, it's a good novel, although often a bit repetitious and thus frustrating sometimes early on, but stick with it. What Straub is trying to say here may not be new, but it is worth the time you put in to read the book. His approach is different but a good one. I don't know that I would specifically label it horror, but more of a psychological suspense with elements of the supernatural involved.(less)

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Apr 02, 2011 Maciek rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, read-in-2011, reviewed

I like Peter Straub. He's an ambitious writer who tries to do more with his novels, stretch out, ignore the borders and "go there", to the vast, unexplored land of the possibility of invention. Clive Barker didn't name him "a great classicist" without a reason - he's a pleasure to read. His work is intriguing, memorable and intelligent - the weird tale of Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale that makes Shadowland, the terror of Eva Galli and the Chowder society in Ghost Story and the Vietnam vets wh...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Marek rated it 2 of 5 stars

I usually love Peter Straub, and have been reading his books for the better part of 30 years. I found A Dark Matter to be a very unreadable book. As is usual with Straub novels, it's paragraphs and dense with description. What other writers might show in a sentence or two, Straub will spend a page or two. This is both his strength and weakness. Overall though, I find it to be a positive. In that matter, this book is no different. Also Straub has clear likeable characters in the book. Where he fa...more

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Mar 25, 2013 D.M. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: horror

A group of teenage students led by a narcissistic self-proclaimed guru, gather in a meadow to work occult magic. What ensues changes all their lives. The story is told by the husband of one of the main partakers of this rite, who, seeking answers and material for his next book, meets up with some of them decades later and they relate their individual stories of that event. And aside for what is revealed about what happened in the meadow, there's other mysteries solved.

This novel contained subje...more A group of teenage students led by a narcissistic self-proclaimed guru, gather in a meadow to work occult magic. What ensues changes all their lives. The story is told by the husband of one of the main partakers of this rite, who, seeking answers and material for his next book, meets up with some of them decades later and they relate their individual stories of that event. And aside for what is revealed about what happened in the meadow, there's other mysteries solved.

This novel contained subject material that is in the novel The Talisman, a story co-written by Straub and King, dealing with parallel dimensions, beings from dark depths, and an experience, or journey, taken by a key character in and through the mysteries. This novel brought in that concept and also that of a group of people involved in a secret affair, which reminds of one of Straub's earlier novels, Ghost Story.

One thing I like about Straub is that although the narrative can be as boring as heck, he keeps you reading along; he's just got that knack it seems. The Talisman, a novel I have read three times, still intrigues me and the beauty of the writing of that particular story was that it contained Stephen King's feisty writing with Peter Straub's tying up of the lose ends: a most successful writing partnership.

There were times I found myself sighing over reading A Dark Matter and I skimmed over portions of it that were in danger of putting me off to sleep, especially Jason Boatman's second boat trip and immediately following that portion of narrative, Lee Harwell's nosy visit to his wife's hotel. There's unnecessary intricacies of every mundane thing and thus were there little niggles to discard the whole book in those places.

One major criticism - and one that Straub might have offered a veiled explanation for with all his regard for Nathanial Hawthorne through quotes from the novel The Scarlet Letter uttered from the character of cute Hootie Bly, (I read The House of Seven Gables many, many years ago and I don't want to revisit that joint again...snore!) - is about the picky details of the characters and rehashing of information about them that the author has already got well and truly stuck in your head. How many times do we need to hear that Lee Harwell's wife (her name is "Lee" too...annoying?) is nicknamed "Eel". The characters lose their importance, with so much dreary detail, instead of being enhanced.

I still like Straub and I have liked his writing style since the early eighties. The subject matter is an interesting one, that of people messing with black magic and experiencing and suffering the consequences, something that I wrote about in my own novel. There is one line that stuck out from Straub's novel that I fancy is a theme:

"...When love goes bad and wrong, that's when evil is created." P. 375

There's both evil and good in this story, and both have obvious effects on the characters, and that's good enough to make it a morality tale, but a drawn out one.
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Mar 22, 2013 Geoffrey Webster rated it 4 of 5 stars

A Dark Matter is Peter Straub's attempt at writing a story on the occult. It seems to have gotten a bad reputation, however I'm here to tell you that it's simple a good book. It's not great like Ghost Story, but it's compelling and riveting.

Synopsis: A Dark Matter is the story of one man trying to comprehend an event that has shattered the lives of his once inseparable group of friends, an event that happened over four decades prior. After witnessing a homeless man being kicked out of a coffee...more A Dark Matter is Peter Straub's attempt at writing a story on the occult. It seems to have gotten a bad reputation, however I'm here to tell you that it's simple a good book. It's not great like Ghost Story, but it's compelling and riveting.

Synopsis: A Dark Matter is the story of one man trying to comprehend an event that has shattered the lives of his once inseparable group of friends, an event that happened over four decades prior. After witnessing a homeless man being kicked out of a coffee shop, Lee (the main character) is reminded of one of his friends who resides within an insane asylum. From then on, he starts getting in contact with his group of former friends, and puts together a story of a ritual that this group of friends participated in. A ritual that went very, very bad. The book essentially tells the same story four or five times, with different accounts of the events that took place that fateful night.

The book is paced very well, and the tension mounts and mounts. The payoff at the end was very satisfying to me, and I'll tell you why. Rather then just revert to a cliche notion of occult rituals, Straub shows us a strange, bizarre event that even confuses the people who were actually participating in it. I really appreciated that. Rather then summoning the devil or some other cliche, Straub shows us a larger, more elaborate vision of the occult. Giants, centaurs, beasts,the cosmos,time travel and zombies are all involved.

While the book isn't particularly scary or thrilling, it has this pervasive element of creepiness that seeps through the cracks and crevices of the pages. I felt this aura of unease as I read this, and I really got the impression from the characters in the book that this event really has had a profound impact on their psychology.

Another thing that people forget to mention in this book is Straub's great character development. The characters are believable, and you empathize with them when you read about their lives and how they have suffered from what happened during that ritual oh so long ago.

If you're looking for a quick, engaging read, give this book a shot. It's definitely worth your time.(less)

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Mar 07, 2013 Brandon Collinsworth rated it 1 of 5 stars

This is the second Peter Straub book I read and as much as I disliked it, I thought it was actually better than Shadowland. I am such a huge fan of the Jack Sawyer books he writes with Stephen King I can't understand why I hate his solo work so much.

Ok, there are a few things he does do very well in this book and first and foremost is he manages to tell the same story over and over again from different angles and it is always interesting and surprising. Second, there is some truly freaky imager...more

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Mar 07, 2013 Affodil rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller

Ik kreeg Een duister verleden toegeschoven van een collega-recensent die er maar niet in slaagde geboeid te geraken door het verhaal. Hoewel ik net uit een lange leesdip kwam, lukte het mij toch vrij snel om in het verhaal te komen en de eerste –pakweg- 65 bladzijden vorderden vlot, eens ik me aan de wat chaotische schrijfstijl van de auteur gewend had. Toen begonnen bij ons thuis verbouwingen en raakte het boek een aantal weken zoek. Dit had het einde van mijn leesavontuur kunnen zijn, ware het...more Ik kreeg Een duister verleden toegeschoven van een collega-recensent die er maar niet in slaagde geboeid te geraken door het verhaal. Hoewel ik net uit een lange leesdip kwam, lukte het mij toch vrij snel om in het verhaal te komen en de eerste –pakweg- 65 bladzijden vorderden vlot, eens ik me aan de wat chaotische schrijfstijl van de auteur gewend had. Toen begonnen bij ons thuis verbouwingen en raakte het boek een aantal weken zoek. Dit had het einde van mijn leesavontuur kunnen zijn, ware het niet dat ik intussen zwaar geïntrigeerd geraakt was door Het Grote Geheim waar iedereen in het boek zo mee worstelde.
Dus toen na een paar dagen de eerste drukte voorbij was, klom ik op en over kasten en dozen en zocht me letterlijk bont en blauw, want ik moést weten hoe duister dat verleden dan wel was. De opbouw van de spanning aan het begin van het boek verdient dus zeker applaus.
De verteller van het verhaal is de buitenstaander van toen, de romanschrijver die getrouwd is met één van de hoofdpersonen in het drama. Met een paar meevallers (en de hulp van zijn vrouw) kan hij de protagonisten één voor één opsporen en contacteren. Bedoeling: hen allen weer samen brengen en ieder zijn eigen versie laten vertellen van de gebeurtenissen van 40 jaar geleden, waarbij hij als een soort ghostwriter fungeert.
En daar begint dan het boek twee kanten op te trekken. Enerzijds bleef ik geboeid door het gegeven zelf. Anderzijds moet ik eerlijk toegeven dat ik er – zelfs nu ik het helemaal uit heb- nog geen hoogte van krijg.
“Is dit een grap of om te huilen?” Ik leen deze vraag maar even van Herman van Veen. En over het antwoord ben ik er nog steeds niet uit.
De gebeurtenissen die geleid hebben tot het drama dat de levens van de deelnemers voor altijd veranderde: was het een geval van groephysterie? Een gezamenlijke hallucinatie? Hypnose? Hadden ze allemaal op hetzelfde moment een bad trip? Het was tenslotte de begintijd van de grote wereldwijde hash- en LSD-fuif. Of had het toch met esoterie en occultisme van doen? Viel in die noodlottige nacht voor heel even de grens tussen 2 parallelle werelden weg? Bij het laatste relaas moest ik zelfs heel sterk denken aan een soort “Alice in W(Z)onderland” voor volwassenen.
Conclusie: de plot is sterk, wat er mee gedaan is verdient vooral de naam chaotisch. Er had volgens mij méér in gezeten. De schrijfstijl vraagt vooral in het begin het nodige doorzettingsvermogen van de lezer. Eens je er aan gewend bent, past hij wel bij het thema van het boek.
Ik heb mezelf verbaasd over de gretigheid waarmee ik Een duister verleden las, want het is helemaal niet het soort verhaal waar ik uit eigen beweging aan zou beginnen. Maar aan het einde bleef ik op mijn honger zitten.
En iets waar ik me echt vragen bij stel: kan het dat in deze tijd een uitgave nog een hele reeks schrijffouten bevat?(less)

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Jan 02, 2013 Mickey rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've been a Peter Straub fan since reading The Talisman and Black House, his collaborations with Stephen King. Both are masterful storytellers who complement each other extremely well.

I listened to A Dark Matter via unabridged audiobook, and I highly recommend it. I've found within the past year or so that the commute goes by more quickly (and with far less stress) when I'm listening to a story.

There are certain authors who benefit from having their books read aloud, and I'll say that Straub is...more

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Sep 13, 2012 Chris added it

I really wanted to like this book. I've only read The Talisman and Black House before, but never anything by Straub alone.

My review should really be zero stars, as I didn't finish it, and I HATE doing that.

The story is about author Lee Harwell, and his quest to find out what happened in "the Meadow" many years before, and involved his wife and several other acolytes of an occultist guru named Spencer Mallon.

Really, I listened to this book in audio format, and the first hour and a half are almo...more

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Aug 13, 2012 P.J. Shann rated it 1 of 5 stars

I love many of Peter Straub's novels, crimes and horrors both old and new, but this isn't one of them. A Dark Matter is the last in a disappointing sequence that also includes Lost Boy, Lost Girl and In The Dark Room, but ADM, for me, is the worst. It's generally impossible to criticise the quality of his prose, but this is a very tired story. The elements of the story are so familiar to be over- and even tiresomely over-familiar, all covered by Straub in other, better novels, and at times it fe...more

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Aug 01, 2012 Myron Brown rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the 1960's four teenage friends entranced by a guru participated in a ceremony that changed their lives forever. In the present, the husband of one of the four investigates what happened that day many years ago. The strength of this book lies in the characters and how the shifting point of views add to the overall mystery. Straub is successful at slowly revealing what went on that night and how that night changed the individuals involved. What starts off as fragmented pieces of a puzzle makes...more

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Jun 13, 2012 Jeremy marked it as to-read

...more

Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group’s members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub's many ardent fans, and win him legions more.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this tour de force from bestseller Straub (In the Night Room), four high school friends in 1966 Madison, Wis.—Hootie Bly, Dilly Olson, Jason Boatman, and Lee Truax—fall under the spell of charismatic wandering guru Spencer Mallon. During an occult ceremony in which Mallon attempts to break through to a higher reality, something goes horribly awry leaving one participant dead. Decades later, Lee's writer husband interviews the quartet to find out what happened. In Roshomon-like fashion, each relates a slightly different account of the trauma they experienced. Straub masterfully shows how the disappointments, downturns, and failed promise of the four friends' lives may have stemmed from this youthful experience, and suggests, by extension, that the malignant evil they helped unleash into the world has tainted all hope ever since. Brilliant in its orchestration and provocative in its speculations, this novel ranks as one of the finest tales of modern horror. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Six book critics venture into a new novel by a best-selling horror writer. The writer is said to have magical abilities to blend horror conventions with literary fiction to keep the pages turning. He is even said to have touched Stephen King! Four of the critics come away convinced that a transcendent supernatural event has occurred, which may have something to do with the nature of evil. But two are horribly scarred by the event--unbearably bored, convinced they have just read a rejected script from Lost. Whose version of events is true? We may never know. All critics agree on is that the only possible way to describe such a plot structure is to reference Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon--so readers may just have to investigate for themselves.

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May 04, 2012 Lisa Louie rated it 2 of 5 stars

At the moment, I'm researching gurus and the 1960's for a writing project, so I picked up Peter Straub's novel, A Dark Matter, because it promised a depiction of a guru set in the 1960's. A horror story, the novel's plot is organized around a singular event which happens in the chaotic turbulence of the 1960's when a self-fashioned guru, Spencer Mallon, arrives in a college town in Wisconsin and convinces a group of teenagers and a couple of creepy frat boys to participate in an arcane ritual de...more At the moment, I'm researching gurus and the 1960's for a writing project, so I picked up Peter Straub's novel, A Dark Matter, because it promised a depiction of a guru set in the 1960's. A horror story, the novel's plot is organized around a singular event which happens in the chaotic turbulence of the 1960's when a self-fashioned guru, Spencer Mallon, arrives in a college town in Wisconsin and convinces a group of teenagers and a couple of creepy frat boys to participate in an arcane ritual described by a medieval practitioner of black magic. They conduct the ritual in a college field, and one of the frat boys ends up brutally murdered; the other participants are irreparably changed. One of them ends up in a psych ward. The novel's main narrator and best friend to all the teens who participated in the ritual, Lee, had refused to meet Mallon, and therefore was not present for the fateful ritual. Since all of his friends either disappear or maintain a hallowed, painful silence about that day, Lee arrives in late middle age without knowing what transpired there. When Lee encounters an indigent man who reminds him of the friend in the psych ward, he decides to investigate the past in order to understand what happened to his friends that day. He finds his friends, one by one, and each tells his or her story, and with each account we learn a little more about Mallon and about what happened in the field. By the end of it, Straub describes an unknown and uncontrollable metaphysical force, innate but ultimately separate, as if it were a mindless, metaphysical uber-cell that visits itself upon the unlucky few born to become serial killers. A force that can be conjured by the right mixture of hocus-pocus and arrogance, it appears to right the balance of cosmic justice.

There were many aspects of this novel that I didn't buy, Mallon as guru prime among them. In order for the story to work for me, I needed to be able to believe in the guru at the center of it, needed to recognize in him a hint of truth by which I too could be seduced. What I encountered in Straub's rendering of Mallon was disappointing. Throughout each narrative, the characters who followed Mallon into the field describe him as possessing a charismatic magnetism that was difficult to withstand. As a reader, I have no way to verify such experiential proof. So in my imagination, Mallon never became anything more than a slick, hotshot salesman in hippy disguise with exotic travel stories and a single faux-Zen line, “Everything is everything,” that supposedly made them all weak in the knees. All by itself, this line, “Everything is everything,” makes no sense. And it is repeated over and over in the novel, a placeholder for an entire worldview that is never really revealed. Perhaps this omission was intentional. Perhaps Straub only wanted to use Mallon as a narrative device to bring us to the field where we are invited to contemplate the metaphysical scene and supernatural acts of justice that are wrought there. When all angles were told, this scene also failed for me. With visions of chess pieces and mercury-skinned beings and insane, elderly jesters, I couldn't shake the sense that all I was witnessing was a rather colorful shared dream. Given that the novel form itself is a kind of shared dream, a finely wrought lie, the story's central dream had to penetrate into our shared reality in order to become truly frightening and believable. I don't know how such penetration is accomplished exactly, but I suspect that it starts with tapping into a common, primordial fear such as the kind that Stephen King trades in.

All is not lost though. Straub's rendering of Mallon demonstrates an interesting lesson: You must believe in your characters yourself in order to make them believable to your readers. Often it seemed as if Straub were writing this novel for the baby-boom generation, and thereby assumed that all he had to do was to point at the guru character as if it were a pre-existing symbol that would activate in his readers all the guilt and churlish ambivalence of the times. What fools we all were, his tone seems to suggest, as if invoking this hindsight was horrific enough to give his paper-thin guru character a pass. If Straub had taken the time to craft a guru character that could have seduced even him, then perhaps this horror story would have been far more existentially frightening and affecting than it is.
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Mar 24, 2011 Rachael Summerly rated it 3 of 5 stars

A story of childhood friendship with a twist.
The book immediately draws the reader in with the mystery of the 'dark matter' and grips from the start. Straub's knack of making us feel we truly know the characters helps the story to flow however it does not seem to reach the climax one wishes for.
It was a beautiful read, almost poetic, but I was left rather disappointed. Questions seemed to be left unanswered for me but perhaps that was the point, and the mystery never could be fully explained....more

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Mar 12, 2011 Steven Belanger rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Interesting read from the POV of a writer. Might have liked it less if I'd read it when I first encountered Straub in the 80s, solely as a reader. What I mean is, the ending isn't really in doubt, per se, in the sense that you're not worried about any of the characters. You know they'll be okay. It's a little like The Decameron, in a way, maybe like Canterbury Tales as well: basically a small bunch of specifically designed people (they're not stock characters; that's important) who all tell thei...more

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Jul 08, 2010 D. Eric rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

What a let down. I have loved every Peter Straub book (I have read them all) up until this one. A Dark Matter simply goes nowhere. The characters are uninteresting and even a bit annoying at times, and the constant rehashing of events through the eyes of different characters just gets boring in the long run. There also never seems to be a real driving force or need to find out what really happened, and when we do, we are left with "oh, I read all this for that?" Here is the main story line from...more

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Jul 07, 2010 Kirsten rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: from-library, fiction, horror-and-horror-ish

I could NOT put this book down, and came really, really close to being completely antisocial while I was reading it. I found it more absorbing than some of Straub's more recent work, although it is also clear that Straub is still experimenting with the reliability of his narrative and the concept of authorship.

The basic premise is pretty straightforward, and one that's a popular trope for horror writers (Straub has even used it in the past). Decades ago, four of Lee Hayward's friends (including...more

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May 09, 2010 Christine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-reads

In the summer of 1966 eight friends venture into a meadow to take part in a secret ritual. At the end of this ritual only six emerge from the meadow. Those who emerged were changed forever. Lee Harwell was a friend to those who went that night, but declined to go along. Fast forward many decades and Lee is a successful author with a case of writer’s block. An unusual unpublished manuscript found on ebay seems to be the answer to his problem but leads him down a path he never expected to travel....more

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Apr 15, 2010 Roger rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, fantasy, horror

Peter Straub is one of two modern writers who are so good that it is a physical pleasure to read his books. There is a scene in every one of his books where I have been drawn in so much that it is as if I'm actually there. From that point until the end of the book I cannot do anything but read the story. That's not to say everything in the book up to that point isn't worth the read, far from it, but it's as if everything leading up to that point is buildup, foreplay, anticipation, and the pivota...more

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Mar 26, 2010 Peggy rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review originally appeared at RevolutionSF.com:

It was 1966 in Madison, Wisconsin. A group of teens fascinated with a self-proclaimed guru named Spencer Mallon agree to participate in a ritual with him. By the time it's over, one of them has disappeared, one of them is insane, one is going slowly blind, one has been literally torn apart, and all have been altered. Years later, the only member of their group of friends who wasn't there, now a successful writer, tracks down his old friends and...more This review originally appeared at RevolutionSF.com:

It was 1966 in Madison, Wisconsin. A group of teens fascinated with a self-proclaimed guru named Spencer Mallon agree to participate in a ritual with him. By the time it's over, one of them has disappeared, one of them is insane, one is going slowly blind, one has been literally torn apart, and all have been altered. Years later, the only member of their group of friends who wasn't there, now a successful writer, tracks down his old friends and gets them to tell their versions of what happened that night.

Recalling Rashomon, each story differs in the details, and those differences give us insights into the characters telling the story. Also like Rashomon those differences and what they reveal about the characters is more important to Straub than illuminating exactly what happened that night and what it all means, so if you're only interested in linear storytelling with concrete conclusions, you'll want to look somewhere else. But if you're a “the journey is more important than the destination” type, you'll find a lot here to enjoy.

The prose itself is fluid without being flowery, and the pacing is very consistent. The chracters themselves are both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the novel. Some characters shine: bitter, empty Meredith Bright is just as chilling in her way as nascent serial killer Keith Hayward.

And Howard “Hootie” Bly is a revelation. He was so undone by the incident that he retreated into madness, able to communicate only by quoting from various books, mostly Hawthorne. Hootie's innate gentlenss and goodness is as clear and effective as Meredith Bright's emptiness. Straub's affection for Hootie is clear, and it's well nigh impossible not to agree.

Because so much of the information is filtered through one character (Lee Harwell, the writer), it's sometimes hard to get a grasp on the others in the group, or to know if a description or insight is objectively true, or merely Lee's opinion. This adds yet another Rashomon-layer to the story, but leaves the reader a bit adrift.

The other big problem for me was the character of Spencer Mallon. We're told about Mallon: he's devilishly handsome, he's ridiculously charismatic, he inspires devotion bordering on adoration from the group; but (barring a couple of glimpses by Lee that may or may not be Mallon, since he never met him when they were young) we never experience that charisma for ourselves. This may have been a conscious choice by Straub; we're in the same boat as our narrator, who only knows Mallon by what he's been told. But given that Mallon is another survivor of the incident, one can only wonder what his version of that night would have looked like.

So if you're looking for a straight-up, good-vs-evil, good wins in the end horror story, you probably won't be happy with what you find here. But if you're interested in good writing, layers of meaning, and a meditation on how what we see and remember often says more about us than about what we've seen, then you should give A Dark Matter a look.(less)

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Nov 10, 2012 Jay Glickman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-horror, fiction-mystery, fiction-fantasy

Peter Straub has been one of my favorite authors for a very long time. I like the horror genre, within certain limits, but Straub goes beyond mere horror, into the rarely achieved realm of mortal dread, which is so much more effective than a good scare.

Beyond that, he's a damned good writer in the best literary sense, with a real sense of poetry that manages to convey impressions of the eternal and the sacred, instead of just plot and character. As such, his novels sometimes be very difficult t...more Peter Straub has been one of my favorite authors for a very long time. I like the horror genre, within certain limits, but Straub goes beyond mere horror, into the rarely achieved realm of mortal dread, which is so much more effective than a good scare.

Beyond that, he's a damned good writer in the best literary sense, with a real sense of poetry that manages to convey impressions of the eternal and the sacred, instead of just plot and character. As such, his novels sometimes be very difficult to review, because their true value is so ethereal.

Straub's usual mode of expression is Gothic; not in the sense of frightened damsels in filmy nightclothes, but more in the Southern Faulknerian tradition - stories of past events that maintain an inescapable stranglehold on the present. Past works, such as the Blue Rose Trilogy (Mystery, Koko, and The Throat) and Ghost Story have explored how unresolved matters have a way of dragging one back into the past to be confronted, often in a surreal and terrifying way. A Dark Matter is no different.

Lee Harwell is a modestly successful Chicago author. Forty years ago, his wife-to-be (also named Lee, and known as The Eel) and four high school classmates participated in a mysterious rite orchestrated by charismatic late 60's guru Spencer Mallon. Exactly what happened that night remains unclear, because Harwell did not participate, but of the only other people present (two college students), one disappeared forever, and the other was torn apart.

Lee's classmates were also permanently changed - Don Olson, apprenticed to Mallon, vanished with him in the aftermath. Jason Boatman went from being a talented shoplifter to a bitter professional thief. Howard Bly has been in a mental institiution for four decades. And his wife, The Eel, has gone blind. Now, after a chance encounter brings back to Harwell the buried horror of that enigmatic night, he decides to find out what really happened.

Further discussion of the plot would be unrevealing, because what Lee discovers is that each of those present that night has seen something different, and all of what they have seen is impossibly surreal. This is where Straub's talent for the otherworldly attains full force. Many of his previous novels have focused on what one of his characters once called "the world beneath the world" - the true, absolute, and insensible realm that constantly lurks behind the thin scrim of what humanity consensually defines as reality. What lies there is inimical to sanity and safety, and that place is where Spencer Mallon unwittingly lead his devoted followers.

The beauty of this concept lies in its poetical imagery and its ambiguity - here good and evil, beauty and horror, love and hatred, are the same thing, tied together in eternity, and definable only by the eye of the beholder. In this reality, what you depart with is just exactly what you bring in, though it may weigh more on the way out. Sometimes much more. In the end, Lee Harwell will get his answers, but perhaps the most important thing he learns is how fortunate he was to have remained outside the circle of his friends one night in 1966.(less)

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Feb 28, 2010 Wanda rated it 1 of 5 stars

Years after performing a forbidden ritual during which a group of young people are brought in contact with “unspeakable evil” by a guru in 1966, the protagonist, Lee Harwell, reminisces about that night and its sequelae. The incident is set among the swirl of the 1960’s college life in Madison, Wisconsin, and those heady days of Vietnam, predatory gurus, and post teen age angst infuse the narrative. To perform this supernatural ritual, eight people go into a meadow, six come out alive. One body...more

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Jul 13, 2012 Dave B. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It was an interesting read. I enjoyed tracking down the mystery of this small group of kids that followed Mallon down a very scary road. The story was not very scary and often reminded me of King's Hearts of Atlantis where scary, other dimensional, beings are engaging and/or manipulating mankind.

Positive points: great cross weaving of classic novels Straub engages Hawthorne's Scarlet letter so well I had to reconsider my high school based opinion of the story. Another great point was his metaph...more

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Apr 08, 2013 Shovelmonkey1 rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: bookcrossing-books, brain-fluff, murder-most-horrid, read-in-2013, you-are-twisting-my-melon-man, a-sphincter-says-what

I've never encountered Peter Straub before and if it was not for the cautionary words of Maciek, who informed me that this was his most non scary output, i would probably not run out to seek his alternative works. My motivation for purchasing this book was quite shallow - there was a quote with the word 'terrifying' followed by the name Stephen King . Ah, i thought, there's a man who knows scary . If it made Mr King crap his pants then that is high praise indeed . All i can say is that maybe Ste...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Johnarthurmiller Miller rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm only on page 27, but it's refreshing to see that Peter Straub is putting his money where his mouth is as he did with "Poe's Children," a a wonderful anthology-idea of his in which he combined horror with literary "style" writing. In "A Dark Matter" Straub doesn't write like Earnest Hemingway or Richard Matheson; he lays it down in longer-winding prose, until laters are thrown over the mind, and a weird sense of reality begins to form as only THIS style of literary writing can induce in the r...more I'm only on page 27, but it's refreshing to see that Peter Straub is putting his money where his mouth is as he did with "Poe's Children," a a wonderful anthology-idea of his in which he combined horror with literary "style" writing. In "A Dark Matter" Straub doesn't write like Earnest Hemingway or Richard Matheson; he lays it down in longer-winding prose, until laters are thrown over the mind, and a weird sense of reality begins to form as only THIS style of literary writing can induce in the reader's mind.

Edit: I'm quitting the book. Maybe if I wasn't so stressed and busy with school I could get into this book. It perturbs me that I'm not finishing it (I hate NOT finishing books), but the lack of character development, the lack of narrative hooks, and the complete disarray of scattered characters and jumping from one to the other confuses me. I just finished Allende’s “The House of the Spirits” and loved it, a great literary read, so the lack of clarity in Straub’s book isn’t from difficulty in understanding complicated literary works. It could just be that it comes down to personal choice, but I feel that Straub tries too hard to be a literary writer, tries too hard to push himself, to try new things, to be “literary” when at his center he’s a plot-driven author. The true definition of what a “literary work” consists of is to have it TRANSCEND mere plot and character development, and this book certainly does not transcend anything; in fact, it seems to teeter at the edge of one of Lady Gaga’s songs, about to fall off into oblivion.

I understand fully about Straub’s fascination with combining horror with literary merit. I read (and mostly loved) “Poe’s Children,” an anthology he set up with other writers (Stephen King included). The best story in that anthology is “The Man on the Ceiling” which, in my estimation, isn’t horror but won everything there was to be won and is a great literary read by the husband/wife team of Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem. But I must admit that I had difficulty getting into Straub’s short story of that book, and felt that King’s story was a bit tedious, too. So in thinking along those lines, I feel that it’s very possible that it comes down to a distinction of style and flavor and personal choice.

Yet at the same time, when I can’t appreciate the narrative hooks, the characters, etc., I have to concede that King’s endorsement of Straub’s book might be more out of friendship than true bona-fide appreciation for the book. I personally detest having to wade through hundreds of pages to get to the good, juicy parts. A true writer (IMHO) can and DOES fill in the back-story with well-written and interesting, as John Steinbeck did in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

In conclusion, I have to say that the style of writing should not impede the reader, but help them progress through the novel, pull the reader forward, engage and intertwine the reader. Failure to do so simply means that language has gotten in the way, has displaced itself between the writer and reader, so that clarity and enjoyment is dulled.

To me, this is a book made great by a publisher’s marketing team and a blurb from Stephen King and the endorsements of others; it is not a book made great in the minds of most readers who will quickly lose attention.
(less)

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Jun 18, 2011 Cher rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

Okay, so this seems like a reader's digest version of a Stephen King novel. The protagonist is a writer. Check. His childhood crew was a bunch of abused boys and the one beautiful girl they all liked. Check. There was an unspeakable supernatural terror they all confronted in their childhood. Check. I really like his actual sentences, the prose style, but I'm waiting for the plot to take off and do something new.

Ugh -- nevermind that whole "reader's digest" comment. 400 pages is way too long to t...more

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Aug 11, 2010 Heather rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you were forced to distill the world down into it's essence, and the goal of humanity down to it's simplest form, I think that what you would have is the struggle for good over evil. This theme is at the heart of almost everything we do as a people-the way we treat family and friends, the way we structure our society, the way we write our laws. It's the basis for most religions. And it is the theme of an awful lot of literature. Including A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub.

I first discovered Stra...more If you were forced to distill the world down into it's essence, and the goal of humanity down to it's simplest form, I think that what you would have is the struggle for good over evil. This theme is at the heart of almost everything we do as a people-the way we treat family and friends, the way we structure our society, the way we write our laws. It's the basis for most religions. And it is the theme of an awful lot of literature. Including A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub.

I first discovered Straub through his collaborations with Stephen King, and I have loved his work for much the same reason-good character development, intriguing supernatural plots, both of which have something to say about the world as we know it. While he occasionally strays away from the horror genre, his best stuff, to me, are the scary, inexplicable stories. I was very excited to find the latest Straub in the boxes of books my mother had for me on my last visit. I think that I may have psyched myself up a little too much!

A Dark Matter is the story of five high school friends growing up in Madison, WI in the 1960s. Four of them fall under the spell of a "guru" named Spencer Mallon, and follow him into a field one spring night to participate in an arcane ritual designed to change the world-for better or for worse is yet to be seen. The ritual leaves one person dead, and sends another to a mental hospital. Forty years later, the friend who didn't go, Lee Harwell, famous author, calls all of his former friends together (including his wife), and Roshamon style they tell the story of what happened to them in that clearing.

This sounds like exactly my cup of Oolong, but for some reason I had trouble sipping it down. The story just did not hold my attention the way his books usually do. I grew frustrated with the slow doling out of details, and I often found myself having to go back and re-read a page because my mind had drifted to other things-never a good sign for a book. When we finally got to the big reveal, I was a little underwhelmed. When we finally get to the last story, the final piece of the puzzle, I was surprised to find that all of the preceding pages were leading up to the idea that without evil, you cannot have good, therefore there are evil beings in the world. Not exactly the most profound (or original, or creatively made) statement. I was so disappointed! I had obviously worked myself up into such a lather of excitement about a new Peter Straub that I was probably bound to be slightly disappointed regardless, but I really think that this is just not his best work. If you've never read Straub before, start with Ghost Story, or Koko, or Mystery, or the Hellfire Club, and read his collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House.(less)

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Jul 23, 2012 Elleigh rated it 4 of 5 stars

I liked it, I would recommend it. It's very Stephen king-ish and I could almost see the bits that Stephen king would have liked, I can understand why they did the talisman, and bleak house etc together. I thought the main characters pretty well rounded it took me a while to really distinguish Jason boatman and dilly Olson since the other characters were quite unique, this could also be a flaw of my fast reading/not paying attention. I liked the subplots of Keith Hayward ( I think I'm getting the...more

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Mar 31, 2011 Eric Bauman rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2011

Okay, I may be going into an area (literary analysis) with which I am not comfortable in this review.

I enjoy horror fiction. Stephen King and Peter Straub are undoubtedly two of the giants of the genre (along with F. Paul Wilson). When I see a new book by any of these three gentlemen, I usually get it the first day it’s out. I love almost everything Mr. King and Dr. Wilson put out. Mr. Straub, on the other hand, I have a more difficult time with, and I think that I finally figured out why in rea...more Okay, I may be going into an area (literary analysis) with which I am not comfortable in this review.

I enjoy horror fiction. Stephen King and Peter Straub are undoubtedly two of the giants of the genre (along with F. Paul Wilson). When I see a new book by any of these three gentlemen, I usually get it the first day it’s out. I love almost everything Mr. King and Dr. Wilson put out. Mr. Straub, on the other hand, I have a more difficult time with, and I think that I finally figured out why in reading this book.

The setup for this novel is thus: in 1966, a guru-type named Spencer Mallon gathers together a group of three college students and four high-school students and seduces them so that they will help him enact a ritual. His intentions, as far as we can tell, are not evil in any way, but things go horribly wrong in the ritual, causing one college student to get ripped to shreds and another to apparently disappear from this world altogether. The narrator of the novel is a successful author who is having trouble writing his next book. Taking a cue from his editor, he thinks about tackling a non-fiction book, and decides to look into what happened in that meadow in 1966. As it turns out, the narrator was a friend of the four high-school students in the ritual, and was invited to take part, but he wasn’t taken in by Mallon and thus stayed away (in fact, he felt he was kept away by the other four). He spends the novel getting in touch with his four friends (one of whom is his wife) to find out what they all saw.

I find that part of this—the author being apart from the story—is an apt metaphor for how I see Mr. Straub’s books. Mr. King and Dr. Wilson’s books tend to get me involved emotionally: I almost feel like I have a stake in what happens to the characters and I feel compelled to read on to see what happens. With Mr. Straub however, I feel as though I’m standing apart from the story just watching. With this book (as I said in an early status update after 50 pages on goodreads.com), Mr. Straub had set a beautiful table and I was anxious for the feast. But when it came out, I found that the food, while good, wasn’t sumptuous like I would have expected after the setup.

This is not to say that I feel this way about all of Mr. Straub’s books. “Ghost Story” and “Shadowland” are two of my favorite books of all time, and I can still remember details of those books 25+ years after reading them (hmmm—I may have to reread them, actually). "The Talisman"? I have worn through two copies of the book from all the rereading of that I've done. But I find with some of his later books, like the Tim Underhill trilogy and others, that I get to the end and I’m either completely confused (not that hard, considering I’m not that bright) or I just feel an overwhelming sense of “meh”.

This book is good, close to great, even, but I wouldn’t call it excellent. It’s enjoyable, but it didn’t completely involve me.

3.5 / 5(less)

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Mar 21, 2011 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I'm having a bit of difficulty in digesting A Dark Matter's ending and I fear that it may be souring the whole of the experience for me. The final segment is the events of the field as seen by The Eel, the younger female present at the ritual and the one who experienced the most in another world including a tour of hell, a philosophical discussion with a demon who affects a New York accent, glimpses of the future, explanations of the past and some of the loose ends cauterized into stubs.

I didn't...more

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About Peter Straub

Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 2 March, 1943, the first of three sons of a salesman and a nurse. The salesman wanted him to become an athlete, the nurse thought he would do well as either a doctor or a Lutheran minister, but all he wanted to do was to learn to read.

When kindergarten turned out to be a stupefyingly banal disappointment devoted to cutting animal shapes out of heavy...more Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 2 March, 1943, the first of three sons of a salesman and a nurse. The salesman wanted him to become an athlete, the nurse thought he would do well as either a doctor or a Lutheran minister, but all he wanted to do was to learn to read.

When kindergarten turned out to be a stupefyingly banal disappointment devoted to cutting animal shapes out of heavy colored paper, he took matters into his own hands and taught himself to read by memorizing his comic books and reciting them over and over to other neighborhood children on the front steps until he could recognize the words. Therefore, when he finally got to first grade to find everyone else laboring over the imbecile adventures of Dick, Jane and Spot (“See Spot run. See, see, see,”), he ransacked the library in search of pirates, soldiers, detectives, spies, criminals, and other colorful souls, Soon he had earned a reputation as an ace storyteller, in demand around campfires and in back yards on summer evenings.

This career as the John Buchan to the first grade was interrupted by a collision between himself and an automobile which resulted in a classic near-death experience, many broken bones, surgical operations, a year out of school, a lengthy tenure in a wheelchair, and certain emotional quirks. Once back on his feet, he quickly acquired a severe stutter which plagued him into his twenties and now and then still puts in a nostalgic appearance, usually to the amusement of telephone operators and shop clerks. Because he had learned prematurely that the world was dangerous, he was jumpy, restless, hugely garrulous in spite of his stutter, physically uncomfortable and, at least until he began writing horror three decades later, prone to nightmares. Books took him out of himself, so he read even more than earlier, a youthful habit immeasurably valuable to any writer. And his storytelling, for in spite of everything he was still a sociable child with a lot of friends, took a turn toward the dark and the garish, toward the ghoulish and the violent. He found his first “effect” when he discovered that he could make this kind of thing funny.

As if scripted, the rest of life followed. He went on scholarship to Milwaukee Country Day School and was the darling of his English teachers. He discovered Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac, patron saints of wounded and self-conscious adolescence, and also, blessedly, jazz music, which spoke of utterance beyond any constraint: passion and liberation in the form of speech on the far side of the verbal border. The alto saxophone player Paul Desmond, speaking in the voice of a witty and inspired angel, epitomized ideal expressiveness, Our boy still had no idea why inspired speech spoke best when it spoke in code, the simultaneous terror and ecstasy of his ancient trauma, as well as its lifelong (so far, anyhow) legacy of anger, being so deeply embedded in the self as to be imperceptible, Did he behave badly, now and then? Did he wish to shock, annoy, disturb, and provoke? Are you kidding? Did he also wish to excel, to keep panic and uncertainty at arm's length by good old main force effort? Make a guess. So here we have a pure but unsteady case of denial happily able to maintain itself through merciless effort. Booted along by invisible fears and horrors, this fellow was rewarded by wonderful grades and a vague sense of a mysterious but transcendent wholeness available through expression. He went to the University of Wisconsin and, after opening his eyes to the various joys of Henry James, William Carlos Williams, and the Texas blues-rocker Steve Miller, a great & joyous character who lived across the street, passed through essentially unchanged to emerge in 1965 with an honors degree in English, then an MA at Columbia a year later. He thought actual writing was probably beyond him even though actual writing was probably what he was best at - down crammed he many and many a book, stirred by(less)

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