Dark Matter: the gripping ghost story from the author of WAKENHYRST

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On a whim, he applies to join an Arctic expedition as a wireless operator, and is thrilled to be accepted - even though he feels a little alienated from his rich, Oxford-educated teammates.

Dark Matter: A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver | Goodreads

Asides from the horror that lurked throughout these pages, this also remained a fascinating historical piece and intriguing insight to mountaineering expertise. His investigations lead him to a series of Mafia clans running Lawless City, and he touchingly decides to rid the city of all wrongdoing. When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting . I was diverted, and there are even a couple of beautifully worded thoughts about the nature of culpability, regret, and brotherhood.It turns out, however, that Lyell's memoirs might have left out some of the more unsavoury details of that doomed attempt, as our intrepid protagonists will discover to their dismay. In fact, I believe keeping the apparitions largely off the page aided in ensuring the raptness of my attention and the fear I shared with the explorers. Her books don’t spend tons of time on character development, but somehow she fits more than she seemingly should be able to for as short as these books are. If you’re new to horror and are looking for something quick but exciting to read, this is definitely a good choice of book to pick up. Yet with all this unrequited or at least unsatisfied love affair with snow on my part Michelle Paver still managed to make even me a little unnerved by the idea of the chill and bleakness and paralysing loneliness of a snowed landscape.

Massive Acclaim For DARK MATTER – Michelle Paver

Dark Matter features an Arctic expedition in 1937, when four young men set off in a Norwegian vessel to spend a year on the remote land spit of Gruhuken on the Barents Sea. Stephen Pearce is a realistic narrator; a man who has spent his life being the bookish, younger brother, of the brave, rich brother. As the seasons change, and the days become shorter, there is an obvious change in the men, their confidence eroded by the ever increasing darkness and the eerie silence of the surrounding land when all the birds have fled before winter. Bad luck seems to dog the expedition and when they arrive at Longyearbyen for the last leg of their journey, they are warned to choose another destination as their base, but the vague rumours about Gruhuken fail to dissuade them. And it is the uncovering of these horrifiying truths which gradually chills and frightens you as the reader.

In this regard, Michelle Paver's "Thin Air" - much like its predecessor Dark Matter - is not your typical ghostly tale since it is the very remoteness of the haunted spaces which makes the setting particularly eerie. So when he’s offered the chance to be the wireless operator on an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. A couple of years ago, someone came upon Irvine’s ice axe on Everest’s north-west ridge, and Kits sulked for weeks. During the winter period within the Arctic Circle (see Norway’s far northern island, Svalbard, in this case), the four months from late October to mid-February will experience Polar Night.