Dark Matter

Dark Matter
by Michelle Paver
Paperback at 7.99

Michelle Paver's 'Chronicles of Ancient Darkness' was a huge hit with our younger readers right from the first book, Wolf Brother. The quality of the series was confirmed when she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize with the sixth in the series, Ghost Hunter. We 'reviewed' her adult title, Dark Matter, when it was in hardback a year ago but now it's a reasonably priced paperback, we thought more people aught to know about it.
   When poverty forces Jack, a rather insular young man, to volunteer as one member of a three man team at an isolated weather station in the Arctic, he believes his main problem may be how to rub along with the other two who are of a different class and lifelong friends. However, it soon becomes apparent that there is another presence out there in the long northern night. When, because of an accident to one of his companions, he is left on his own, his nightmare begins and unlike Ghost Hunter, here it's not the ghost who is hunted, but Jack.
   Told in diary form, this adult ghost story uses many tricks of the trade but uses them well. It has echoes of The Woman in Black in its claustrophobic isolation, but no harm there. It is its own story and expertly told by this author who knows the Arctic well.