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I read A Dark Matter in 2011, and it was magnificent. In 2012, I revisited it from time to time, re-reading favorite scenes. These days, end of May – start of June 2013, I re-read it again from cover to cover. It’s still magnificent. It is not only awesome, it is awe-inspiring. Let me rephrase that: I think this is the best English-speaking book written in the start of the 21-st century. Pre-WWII it was Fitzgerald, post WWII it was Kingsley Amis, post-2000 it’s Peter Straub with his Dark Matter....
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...
"TERRIFYING," says Stephen King on the front cover of this paperback. "Put this one HIGH ON YOUR LIST."Well, I can honestly say this book was neither terrifying, nor will it ever receive the distinct honors of getting anywhere near the top of any of my lists...except maybe the top of the "worst books I have ever read" list.Clearly King was paid a lot of cash to write that blurb, and obviously he and Straub have some kind of weird bromance thing going on since they teamed up for the "Talisman" (w...
A DARK MATTER was a very disappointing book. Uninteresting characters and Straub fails miserably to suspend disbelief. The story becomes absurd toward the end.
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...
This book was a bore and nothing really happened. It don't capture my attention, I would read it and when I would put it down i would immedently forget what I read.(Book 1 of The Read 5 lowest rated books on my shelf)
I wanted to LOVE this book. I really did. When I read the back cover, I was hooked. The premise sounded awesome: a group of college friends in the 1960s fall under the spell of a new age guru, and together they engage in a strange ritual which brings them into contact with otherworldly beings which shape the course of their lives thereafter...And that ritual they conduct is undoubtedly the best part. In fact, it is pretty downright awesome. The creatures/beings that each of them encounter (they
Set largely in the 60's in Madison, Wisconsin, this latest novel by Peter Straub is a wonderfully strange ride, part mystery story, and part supernatural horror tale. A group of teenage friends become infatuated and taken in by the charismatic and older college guru, Spencer Mallon, who insists on performing a ritual ceremony off the campus grounds, in order to provide them all with such life changing enlightenment. Instead, one of their group is brutally killed and another vanishes, seemingly,
Very weak novel of Peter Straub. Moving at a very slow pace. Uninspired characters, he could have done better. I really had to bite through this book. You don't have to read that, there are better ones out of Peter.
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...
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...
A Dark Matter is totally Peter Straub: obscure, difficult, wicked smart, intriguing. If this had been my first experience with Straub I probably would’ve DNF’d, though—only seasoned Straub readers apply. Newbies check out Ghost Story or The Hellfire Club. This novel’s synopsis shouldn’t be enough to carry 400 pages, but Straub is a master of misdirecting and redirecting his readers, spinning them in all sorts of directions and spinning out a tale worth whatever length he chooses. Yes, this one i...
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
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
I get that not everyone will like this book. But it is, in my opinion, one of the highest works of art that I've read in a very long time.The end of the book, like something written by Gene Wolfe (or, for that matter, David Wong), doesn't actually happen at the end of the book, but previously. And so you may come to the last few pages and......feel as though you've been cheated out of a proper ending.All I can say is that this book is not for you. I plan to study and reread this. It is magnifice...
Peter Straub has written some of my favorite horror stories. A Dark Matter is not one of them. In fact, it's a miserable failure in virtually every way, from a narrator who's barely a part of his own story to a narrative structure so redundant and tedious I felt the words pinging unprocessed off my eyeballs to a central conflict that manages to be both incoherent and boring. A few words about the story, because that's all it's worth: narrator Lee Harwell is a writer who wants to find out what re...
Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter takes the setup that Stephen King turned into a horror trope: a group of friends face unspeakable horror as young ‘uns then reconvene when they’re old and damaged to finally defeat that unspeakable horror. Only Straub smartly plays it without the rematch. A Dark Matter isn’t the coming of age take as described above, it’s about age itself, and the events and people who shape us.Lee the narrator is a middle-aged man, best selling novelist married to another Lee (Lee T...
I’m not sure what happened here. There wasn’t anything going on and then there was way too much and I got lost a bit. I am still not quite sure what happened. If you chopped this up into 3 equal pieces and then threw two of them away it would have been much better. Great theme and well written but perhaps a bit ambitious in concept and overblown.
I was into it until the last 50 pages or so. The story of Eel was obviously intended to be the ultimate explanation of the characters' occult experience together. I found it to be, I hate to be mean spirited but I'm going to be anyway: overwritten claptrap. I slogged through it. After all, I was in the last 50 pages of a 400 page book. But the time I was done, I no longer cared about the characters and was angry at the author. I have read other things from Peter Straub and have always liked him....
Lee Harwell is a writer with writer's block and a detective's need to uncover just what happened to his wife and her friends in a meadow in the 1960's. There was a guru, a ritual, and, at the end of the night, a dismembered body. Harwell's wife, Lee Truax, has been obstinately silent about the events of that night. Thus, the story is the unraveling of these mysterious events as Harwell contacts the other people who were in the meadow that fateful night.Many of the disappointed reviews I saw were...