Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Dark Matter

by Michelle Paver

'What is it? What does it want? Why is it angry with me?'

January 1937.

Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to be the wireless operator on an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it.
Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken.
But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go.
Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return - when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible.

And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone.

Something walks there in the dark.

Reviewed by brokentune on

1 of 5 stars

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DNF @ 127p. (of 255p.)

Dark Matter was Paver's first book for the general adult readership, and it shows. To me, this still reads like a YA novel and I cannot get invested in the story or the main character's situation.

What is worse to me, reading Dark Matter after having read Thin Air, is that Dark Matter reads like a practice piece - that, with a few tweaks, would develop into Thin Air later.

I ended up skipping ahead to the end of the story and am glad to have done so. The similarities with Paver's later book are very strong, so I do not feel I missed much by "abridging" this read.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 2 March, 2019: Finished reading
  • 2 March, 2019: Reviewed