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hinesight's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting. Oddly confusing (the married couple at the center of the story had the same first name), really interesting last page; otherwise, pretty much what you'd expect from the genre plus some philosophy add-ons.
badseedgirl's review against another edition
2.0
No one in the world is completely evil. Even Hitler had a mother, and was once a child.
There Mr. Straub. I did it in eighteen words. Why did it take you 500 pages, and a completely boring story to say the same thing?
There Mr. Straub. I did it in eighteen words. Why did it take you 500 pages, and a completely boring story to say the same thing?
wes5000's review against another edition
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
matt357's review against another edition
4.0
A really good shot at a modern gothic horror, which I've struggled to judge as that's not really my cup of tea.
This book writes around the event, which feels right for the style, but as a change it comes at it from several angles. Properly this is the story of one person trying to understand an event that his friends shared in and that he turned down. So we get the same event, and some amount of build up from a lot of perspectives.
This makes the story seem a lot better then it really is, as the retelling and the worsening changes really help set up the tension of the story. The book works on the whole, but that's managed by the writer's skill rescuing a thin premise
This book writes around the event, which feels right for the style, but as a change it comes at it from several angles. Properly this is the story of one person trying to understand an event that his friends shared in and that he turned down. So we get the same event, and some amount of build up from a lot of perspectives.
This makes the story seem a lot better then it really is, as the retelling and the worsening changes really help set up the tension of the story. The book works on the whole, but that's managed by the writer's skill rescuing a thin premise
sandygx260's review against another edition
2.0
This wretched novel made me fear that Straub is just going through the motions.
chasrotramel2024's review against another edition
4.0
A fully enveloping experience of a novel. The territory covered includes how the past controls the present in a person's life, the 60s, mysticism and alternative universes, and serial killers. This makes it sound trite and overblown, but Straub does a great job of digging deep into his subjects without rehashing old work. The only weak point is a limp ending, but the amazing middle part of the book more than makes up for this. Highly recommended.
rbixby's review against another edition
3.0
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 pivotal scene -- whatever it may be -- is the release, the moment in which the fiction becomes real.
I liked this book because I really like Peter Straub's writing. Having said that, I found A Dark Matter to be pretty average. It has a great hook and the characters are as real as any others Straub has created, but it didn't have the immediate visceral energy of The Throat or Shadowland. It didn't have that one scene that really drew me into the story. Straub is great at setting up a world of middle-class American normalcy and then twisting it JUST a bit to make you realized things under the covers aren't normal. In fact, they're pretty much batshit insane.
That didn't happen this time around. The creepy other worldly creatures surrounding the group of friends had the feel of secondary or tertiary characters and their impact was greatly diminished as a result. Reading this, I felt as if Straub was forced to leave a lot on the editing room floor. My feelings were confirmed after I found out about The Skykark, which is being released through Subterranean Press, and is a version of this story that Straub admits is an earlier, rougher, draft. Given that it's also about 200 pages longer than this one, I would venture to guess that's where all the classic Straub Creepiness went.
Read this if you're a fan. But if you're new to Mr. Straub, read Shadowland, Ghost Story, or his Blue Rose trilogy first.
I liked this book because I really like Peter Straub's writing. Having said that, I found A Dark Matter to be pretty average. It has a great hook and the characters are as real as any others Straub has created, but it didn't have the immediate visceral energy of The Throat or Shadowland. It didn't have that one scene that really drew me into the story. Straub is great at setting up a world of middle-class American normalcy and then twisting it JUST a bit to make you realized things under the covers aren't normal. In fact, they're pretty much batshit insane.
That didn't happen this time around. The creepy other worldly creatures surrounding the group of friends had the feel of secondary or tertiary characters and their impact was greatly diminished as a result. Reading this, I felt as if Straub was forced to leave a lot on the editing room floor. My feelings were confirmed after I found out about The Skykark, which is being released through Subterranean Press, and is a version of this story that Straub admits is an earlier, rougher, draft. Given that it's also about 200 pages longer than this one, I would venture to guess that's where all the classic Straub Creepiness went.
Read this if you're a fan. But if you're new to Mr. Straub, read Shadowland, Ghost Story, or his Blue Rose trilogy first.
heatherg213's review against another edition
3.0
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.
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.
professorfate's review against another edition
3.0
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
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