Jack considers himself a victim of the British class system, which has trampled his dreams of being a scientist and left him lonely and working at a mundane job. When he encounters the chance to be the wireless operator on an Arctic expedition in 1937, he enthusiastically accepts his place on a small crew bound for Gruhuken, a small island off of Spitsbergen. But, as the light fades toward four months of winter, the party falls from five to one, and Jack must decide whether to move forward as the savior of the expedition, or to flee to safer lands. Because even when all of Jack's companions have left Gruhuken, he knows with certainty that he is not alone.
Thea and Ana couldn't have known when they handed me Dark Matter that it may be the perfect horror story for me. I've had a lifelong fascination with the Arctic. Winter is my favorite season, I adore Jack London, the Iditarod, and Svalbard (the current name for Spitsbergen) is easily on my top 10 list of places I'd love to visit before I die. I've even spent some time above the Arctic Circle, among the fisherman of Lofoten Islands, but this was still hundreds of miles south of where Jack and his crew set up their camp on Gruhuken. When I lived in Norway, I found the midnight sun to be more of a hindrance than the unending night, but then, I was never left alone with it, locked in a contest to see who would blink first.
Dark Matter is told in the epistolary format, which I feel is ideal for setting one on edge. It's so easy to look at a novel told in journal entries and cling to them as a security blanket. This is our narrator writing, he has to be okay to write it, so clearly nothing truly terrible can happen to him. Right? But what about that letter at the beginning? The one that tells us that someone comes away injured, and someone else comes away dead. With the foreboding sense of a Shakespearean tragedy we enter the scene wondering what will happen if, at some point, the journal entries stop?
A journal is so unflinchingly personal that through his writing Jack is able to draw us into the story and make us privy to his own personal hell. We cannot be impartial observers, we are forced to see things as Jack sees them, the good, the bad, and the terrifying. In Dark Matter, things that you would never worry about on a normal day become the most important objects of focus. The ability to tell time, the waxing and waning of the moon, the distance of a pole from your cabin window...
When Jack first lays eyes on Gruhuken, it is with a heart aching hopefulness. He views this expedition as his chance to escape, to be somewhere that is all his own, to become someone and something he can be proud of. For the first time in his life Jack feels a sense of accomplishment, a sense of triumph, and comradery-perhaps more-with his companion Gus. Even when Jack first begins to realize that Gruhuken is haunted, it is so easy to brush it off as a harmless, if disquieting, echo of the past. There is still light, there is work to do, and Gruhuken is theirs.
It is disturbing to watch Jack's lonely descent into terror, to understand how when a man has something to truly fear, every mundane aspect of the day can add fuel to those flames. Jack wants so badly to be Gus's hero, to be his own hero, that he internalizes all of his fears, falling easy victim to cabin fever.
Of course, Dark Matter isn't all introspection and restlessness, it is a captivating and horrific ghost story, the likes of which has not been matched in my reading. Dark Matter took my love of the Arctic and made it something to fear, chilling me to the core in a way that a haunted house story never could. Suddenly the sound of snow crunching, which I adore, is full of menace. The thought of holing up in a cozy little cabin with a book and the radio while it snows outside is no longer an appealing winter vacation. On top of which, Dark Matter introduced me to draugs, something I've always feared but never had the name for.
I'll admit to two big irrational fears (because the rest of them are completely rational). Statues, and dead people underwater. Yes, statues of people underwater have made me scream and run out of aquariums. No, I do not like the ocean. According to Scandinavian folklore, a draug is the "unquiet spirit of a drowned man who lurks in the shallows, waiting to drag the unwary to their doom". So hey, thanks Michelle Paver for putting a name to something that's always terrified me...but did you have to make the whole thing so damn scary? I literally whimpered aloud, I was on the verge of tears and/or throwing up, and there's a good chance if I had been alone in the house with no witnesses both would have occurred.
So as you can see, Dark Matter was probably the perfect spooky book for me to receive for All Hallows Read. I may not have the biggest backlog to compare it to, but it easily ranks #1 as the scariest book I've ever read. And surprisingly, I loved it. If you're looking for a spooky read to share this All Hallows Read, look to Dark Matter. But consider gifting them a night light as well.
