A Dark Matter

A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub, won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel. As happens with me with horror books (except those by Stephen King), I just don't get it. To me, horror suggests that a book is scary. A Dark Matter is not scary. Straub is a big name in the horror world, selling many books. I've only read one other by him, Mr. X, and I found that as convoluted and dense as this book.

The book is narrated by a writer, Lee Harwell. Back when he was in high school, his future wife and a few other friends came under the spell of a guru named Spencer Mallon. These people, except for Harwell, took place in some kind of summoning of demons in a field, and one person was killed (and dismembered) and another completely vanished. A third person, who has a eidetic memory, was committed to an asylum, unable to speak anything but quotes from The Scarlet Letter.

Harwell, looking for a subject to write about, is interested in a serial killer from the old days in Milwaukee. This ties in to the event in the field, and he tracks down his old friends and tries to piece together exactly what happened.

As I read this book, I kept waiting for something to happen. It was a long tease, until the end, when Harwell's wife (also named Lee, so he refers to her by her full name, Lee Truax, or a nickname, The Eel, which is disconcerting). When we do find out what happens, it's in a kind of overwrought language that makes it difficult to picture what is going on.

Straub is a pretty good phrase maker, though. He had a few choice metaphors and insights, such as: "You know how guys with bow ties can sometimes give you this look, like you just farted and they hope you'll go away before they have to ask you to leave? Pity and contempt."

But Straub is in love with his own writing, and doesn't heed the command to writers, "You must murder your own children." There are gobs of unnecessary detail about meals and such: "After the better than acceptable soup came an uninspiring chicken. When arrayed on the breast of a dry and overcooked chicken, mushrooms and pine nuts do not join hands and sing."  Was this bit of information important to the story?

At the end, when The Eel meets the demons summoned by Mallon and his band, she meets one who speaks like one of the Bowery Boys. Straub here falls into a rookie mistake--he has the demon tell us great truths, which are really quite banal: "'You stupid human beings, the whole thing is right in front of you, but on you go, debating whether evil is internal or external, inherent in everyone or created by circumstance. Nature or nurture, I can't believe you're still debating that dim-witted opposition. The world is divided into two. You have evil within you, you contain evil, that's the basic idea." I think most of us get that, including the church.

Once again, I'm disappointed by so-called horror novels. I'm drawn to them by the book description or even the covers, but invariably I'm let down. This happens with sci-fi, too.