dark matter is a ghost story with a reality twist from michelle paver

Subtitled “A Ghost Story”, Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter is a clever book that takes an historical story and adds a supernatural twist.

Set in 1937, Dark Matter followers a group of young Englishmen who attempt to winter in the arctic circle for purposes of scientific research.
Based on the Oxford University Arctic Expedition of 1935, the book attempts to be as authentic as possible when it comes to describing everything from the type of “chaps” who went on these types of adventures to the technical details of their equipment, and even what they did to entertain themselves.
Paver includes reference material at the end of the book, highlighting that some of the concepts which you may have thought creative licence really occurred.
What she doesn’t know is true or not is the central theme of the haunting – although she does point out in the support material that many of the men who went on the real expedition mentioned an uneasiness about the area of the base camp.
What makes Dark Matter a truly gothic horror story is the creeping sensation of depression, being watched and the possibility of going mad in the long, long night of winter in the Arctic.
Jack is not the same as his companions on the trip; he’s poor despite his education, he’s got a bit of a death wish and hates his life. When the opportunity for this expedition arrives he’s oddly reluctant to take it and escape his horribly boring life.
But agreeing to go, Jack decides he’s going to do his utmost to squeeze every ounce of experience from the trip.
Is it his obsession to survive and succeed over his richer teammates or his innate depression that leads to the terrible things that Jack actually experiences in the ice?
It’s only Paver’s skill that allows the reader to make up their own mind about what really happened up there in the dark.
Dark Matters is an interesting read; while it might not make you scared of the dark, it will certainly make you think.
And should you ever find yourself lost in the snow somewhere and remember reading this book, it will make you shiver.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver is published by Orion Books and is available from good book stores and online.

another delicious dark dexter story from jeff lindsay

Dexter is Delicious is the fifth book in the Dexter series from Jeff Lindsay, and yes, these are the books the award-winning TV show Dexter is based on.

The serial killer as hero premise seems old hat now, but when the first book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, was released, the concept was constantly being debated by everyone from high-brow critics to bible-bashing mid-westerners. How dare Lindsay make the hero a psychopathic serial killer? Shocking!
With an award-winning TV show and a heart-throb actor in the central role, the Dexter franchise has become practically mainstream.
Luckily the books are still as well-written as they always were; the structure of the internal monologue continues to work, and the reader still wonders just how Lindsay knows so much about how a serial killer thinks.
In the TV series, Dexter is a father, and in Dexter is Delicious his daughter Lily Anne is also the one thing that’s keeping him on the straight and narrow and out of the electric chair.
At least until he realises that someone from his past, someone who knows rather too much about what really makes Dexter tick, reappears in his life.
If Dexter is threatened, then Lily Anne is threatened; and that is not something you want an accomplished murderer like Dexter thinking about.
To complicate matters, Dexter’s job as a blood spatter analyst gets him involved in the disappearance of an 18-year-old girl who may have been abducted by vampires – who could also be cannibals.
Lindsay’s books are so much more detailed than the TV show, although the voice-over used in the show mirrors somewhat the internal monologue of the character in the novels.
Still, you can read the books and watch the show without too many discrepancies cropping up, which isn’t always true.
For lovers of crime thrillers and murder mysteries or lovers of novels about psychopaths, you can’t go past the Dexter novels; they are a unique twist on a great genre.

Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay is published by Orion Books and is available at all good book stores and online.

new australian writer honey brown looks into the dark of the human psyche

Australian author Honey Brown burst onto that country's literary scene with the tightly written and terrifyingly plotted Red Queen in 2009.

The book won an Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel, was short-listed for the Australian Shadows Award and won a Highly Commended from the FAW Awards.
Now Brown has released The Good Daughter, a novel that doesn't fit into her first genre, but is as well-written and beautifully constructed as the first.

Interestingly it was a freak accident on a farm – she broke her back – that set Brown on her literary path, and despite being confined mostly to a wheelchair and caring for two young children and a farm, she has already finished a third book, with a fourth on the way.
Prolific, yes, but Brown's writing is also very good.
In Red Queen two ordinary men, brothers, find themselves isolated on a hidden property – loosely based on Brown’s own land in rural Victoria – after a deadly virus has broken out across the globe.
The tensions of a sibling relationship are heightened when an unknown woman enters their lives; the elder brother, Rohan, is cut from the typical cloth of a working class Australian man. He is taciturn, separated from his feelings and overly protective of Shannon, the younger brother.
Shannon is a dreamer, he still yearns for his dead parents and the carefree university life he had before the "Red Queen" virus arrived. Rohan, on the other hand, quite likes the hardship of proving himself a man in their daily struggle to survive.
The interloper upsets the brothers' uneasy balance; naturally adding sex to the mix – the boys have been in the bush for a long time, after all.
Brown cleverly mixes these three characters, giving away only small pieces of information so the reader is left waiting to know more, totally unconcerned that there are only three characters in the story.
The plot twist in the denouement is surprising, although a little too altruistic. But Red Queen is the sort of book one can happily describe as literary fiction, while at the same time recommend to your friends who only read thrillers.
The Good Daughter, Brown's second book, is similar in its tight plot, limited character pool and outback Australian setting, but entirely different in its perspective.
Rebecca is the daughter of the title, a teenager from the wrong end of town with a slightly unhealthy interest in the richest boy in the district, Zach.
She also has her mother's reputation to live up to – should she choose her dead mum's rather loose ways or the same woman's heroic acceptance of death from cancer?
Zach has his own problems; his family may be rich but his mother is crazy according to his gruff, aggressive farmer father. And Zach's beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, insanity runs in the family.
Added to the mix is a bastard – Zack's father's by-blow. Suave for the small country town, Aden is a charming rogue who's out to get what he can.
Then Zack's mother disappears, and the last person to see her is Rebecca.
The Good Daughter is a portrait of modern, country Australia: The isolation, the small-town nosiness and censure, the lack of work, the drugs and the depression.
But it also shows some of what can be good about the same place and people – acceptance, warmth and family.
Still, for first time readers of Australian fiction, The Good Daughter doesn't paint a particularly rosy picture.
Brown is obviously a writer to watch. She is part of the Australian tradition of strong female authors who centre their work in their daily lives, but manage to turn the ordinary into the sublime with just the placement of a few words and an ability to look into the dark of the human psyche.

Red Queen and The Good Daughter by Honey Brown are published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books Australia, and are available from good book stores and online.

zombie tales from joe hill, tad williams, mike carey & more in zombie: an anthology of the undead

You can't go past a good zombie story. Thanks to author Christopher Golden, you can now enjoy 19 great short stories about all sorts of zombies from a range of great fantasy and horror writers. Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead includes stories from Joe Hill (of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns fame), Tad Williams, John Connolly, Mike Carey, Holly Newstein and Aimee Bender, among others.
Sitting perfectly with today's zeitgeist, Hill's Twittering from the Circus of the Dead is awesome. He deftly weaves in teen angst, modern obsessions with technology, reality TV, viral marketing and zombies! It can't get much better than that... although, scarily enough, once you read it, you may wonder if it's actually happened.
Tad Williams' character, paranormal investigator Nathan Nightingale, discovers there's more to the afterlife than he ever realised; the biblical tale of Lazarus is seen from an entirely different perspective in John Connolly's hands and Mike Carey's fabulous story about someone actually choosing to become a zombie and the practical issues he needs to deal with is darkly funny.
Golden, who put the anthology together, says in his foreword that he's always understood why people are fascinated by vampires, but can't get why zombies have become so popular: “Eating brains, my friends, is not sexy.”

“When I set out to edit this anthology, I sought out a wide variety of perspectives on the modern fascination with zombies. I asked questions. Are we so inured to death that we now find it charming? Or – and this was my suspicion – do we embrace these ideas as an indirect way of processing the horror that we feel at the reality of war and torture and death?”

Whether or not you can explain the current fascination with zombies, there is no doubt that this anthology is worth a look. If you can't take sitting through a whole book on the subject, the anthology offers various options – zombies that drop from the sky, zombies that work for you, zombies who used to be people you know – and you can grab a bit of zombie genre in small bites (sorry, couldn't resist).

Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead is edited by Christopher Golden and published by Piatkus, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, an Hachette UK company. It is available from good book stores and online.

on the horns of a dilemma; the great bits, and a few patchy bits, in joe hill's horns

Ah... the indomitable Joe Hill returns. There is a lyrical quality to Hill's version of horror, a touch of poetry in not only his prose but also his plots and twists. With Horns, Hill brings us Iggy – a young man, like many other young men in the world. Iggy is in a rut, he's given up on the promise of his youth, he's eking out what life he has left with an accidental girlfriend, a distant family and a heavily embedded pain in his heart where his "one true love" used to be.
Then he wakes up with horns on his head after a night he doesn't remember.

“Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill – wet-eyed and weak – he didn't think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.
“But when he was swaying over the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet.”

The biblical and historical references to the devil are obvious but incongruous as Iggy drives around his small-town America home in his small-town America 1972 AMC Gremlin trying to come to terms with his new look.
It is this juxtaposition of real and fantasy that makes Hill's books such good reads. The New York Times best-selling author of Heart-Shaped Box should be able to write a good read; he's Stephen King's son after all.
While the horror connection is there to King's work, Hill writes with a taught delicacy that reminds the reader of grunge era youths, all skinny, hyped-up strength and dopey, gloomy thoughts.
Prior to getting the horns, Iggy had tumbled from upper-class smugness to white trash depression after the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams. Merrin was his golden girl, the girl he'd loved forever, the one he was going to marry. She was found raped, murdered, dumped in the woods and Iggy was blamed for it.
Wallowing in both his own self-pity and his town's ostracisation, Iggy ends up with a hole in his memory and horns on his head – horns that somehow enable him to know people's deepest, darkest secrets.
The local doctor is a drug addict, the local priest is having an affair, his family hates him … and maybe, just maybe, his brother knows something about Merrin's death.
While I loved the premise of Hill's book, and positively relished his passages involving Iggy and his new-found powers, there are passages in Horns that almost put me to sleep. I have to admit that I gave up about half-way through, read a few other books and skipped to the end, before returning to finish the novel.
Why? The passages that move back in time to Iggy's childhood, his meeting with Merrin and his best friend Lee, are boring. I really didn't care about how the pair came to meet, nor did the detailed background to Lee and Iggy's friendship keep me interested. Hill writes horror and fantasy so much better than he does ordinariness. Still, that could just be my personal preferences talking.
Returning to Iggy's present and the revelations of all and sundry get the book moving along again. Iggy realises that he can influence people with the horns, he can get them to act on their deepest, darkest desires. He also discovers that friendship may not be all it's cracked up to be.
Throughout the book Hill places vignettes of delight; the mysterious tree-house that Iggy and Merrin discover, the horrible death of Lee's mother and the deliciously icky nature of people's revelations are great parts of Horns.
The age old play of good versus evil, the devil versus god also gets a bit of shake up, is Iggy a devil because of his horns? Or are all people devils inside?
I'll admit that I found Horns patchy in some instances, but overall, it is a fantastic read – Hill has produced another great piece of horror fiction, well-worth getting your hands on.

Horns by Joe Hill is published by Gollancz and is available from good book stores and online.