A successful novelist obsessively revisits a fateful night he missed back in the '60s in this intense, ambitious, but unfocused saga of an encounter with ultimate evil. Lee Harwell was once an ordinary high-school senior in Madison, Wis., with a tomboy girlfriend, Lee Truax (dubbed "the Eel" to distinguish her from him), and a handful of other schoolmates-Howard (Hootie) Bly, Jason (Boats) Boatman, Donald (Dilly) Olson-apparently destined for nothing special. Then peripatetic guru Spencer Mallon blew into town and, assisted by his irresistible blond lover Meredith Bright, charmed all the friends but Lee to join him and two University of Wisconsin students, Keith Hayward and Brett Milstrap, in an obscure nocturnal ritual in a nearby meadow. By the time the night was over, Keith was dead and horribly mutilated, and Meredith had disappeared. The years since have treated the survivors very differently. Milstrap has pointedly failed to grow up; the Eel has married Lee and gone blind; Meredith has resurfaced and married money and power; Hootie hasn't budged from the mental hospital to which he was sent, speaking only in quotations from The Scarlet Letter and a dictionary of obscure words; Boats has moved from shoplifting to helping merchants catch shoplifters; and Dilly, apparently the group's leader, has failed to do much of anything. When Lee's agent urges him to try his hand at nonfiction, he recalls the mysterious incident and determines to find out exactly what he missed. As if he'd tapped a rock with a magic wand, a stream of reminiscences, childhood tales, digressive episodes, retrospective analyses and increasingly hair-raising scenarios comes pouring out. But the truth of the BigWhatsit remains shrouded in murky visions and oracular observations ("time isn't linear . . . it goes sideways"), even after the last veil is rent asunder. Straub's last few fantasies (In the Night Room, 2004, etc.) have been ever more baroque, but this tall, dark tale beats them all for heaven-storming scale and wheels within wheels.
The incomparable master of horror and suspense returns with a powerful, brilliantly terrifying novel that redefines the genre in original and unexpected ways.
The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body-and the shattered souls of all who were present.
Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it's through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group's members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub's many ardent fans, and win him legions more.
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The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body-and the shattered souls of all who were present.
Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it's through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group's members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub's many ardent fans, and win him legions more.
A Dark Matter
The incomparable master of horror and suspense returns with a powerful, brilliantly terrifying novel that redefines the genre in original and unexpected ways.
The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body-and the shattered souls of all who were present.
Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it's through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group's members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub's many ardent fans, and win him legions more.
The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body-and the shattered souls of all who were present.
Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it's through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group's members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub's many ardent fans, and win him legions more.
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940169381597 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
Publication date: | 02/09/2010 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
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