A Dark Matter

by Peter Straub

At Readercon, Straub spent the better part of an hour describing the difficult path toward creating this fine new novel, a struggle with old editors and new to publish a book that’s quite unlike his famous Ghost Story. The narrator’s voice in A Dark Matter is precisely Straub’s own, a feat writers seldom achieve even in autobiography, and he captures the contemporary midwest beautifully.

I don’t care for tales of the supernatural: I'm happy with magic as metaphor, yes, or magic as fantasy, but if what you’re selling is teasing apart the fibres of reality to peer at underlying, mystic truth, then I guess I’m a tough customer. But it is what it is, it’s superbly done, and it has characters and scene that I’ll remember for a long time.