My second trip on one of Michelle Paver’s icy cold ghost stories, the first being Dark Matter. I loved that one, and this one proved to be just as good. Having really enjoyed, “Dark Matter,” I was keen to read this, new novel, by Michelle Paver. Normally, I dislike comparing an author’s novels, but there is much to compare in, “Thin Air,” to “Dark Matter.” Both deal with remote places and extreme temperatures. Both are, essentially, ghost stories… On a trip to the Malangen fjord in northern Norway, she went out into the snow one night and the northern lights appeared: “Not the massively lurid ones you see in documentaries, but it was like a twisted arrow or arch pointing north, and it gave me an idea. What if one of the trio leaves? And that’s when the ideas started fizzing.”

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I love reading about the Arctic, about people traveling to the Arctic, about getting lost in the Arctic, about the never-ending nights of winter, the aurora, the weird twilight, the running about by the light of a full moon trying to 'get things done while there's some light.' I love the dogs, the huskies, and the wind blowing and the snow coming down so fast and furious it all but covers your hut/tent/makeshift shelter. It's just so damn creepy. Michelle Paver is most famous for writing a series of fantasy novels for younger readers - which I have not read - and Dark Matter, subtitled A Ghost Story, is her first novel for adult readers.Author Michelle Paver was another wonder to me. Her knowledge of life in the Arctic is so extensive I had to find out more about her and read that Michelle traveled to Finland, Greenland, Sweden, Norway, Arctic Canada, and the Carpathian Mountains. She has slept on reindeer skins, swum with wild killer whales, and gotten nose to nose with polar bears and wolves to research her books. That explained why her book was so realistic and believable. The Sherpas are wrong. This mountain has no spirit, no sentience and no intent. It’s not trying to kill us. It simply is.” [famous last words…]

Dark Matter - LoveReading Opening Extract from… Dark Matter - LoveReading

Following Lyell’s route are Kits, Stephen, Major Cotterell, McLellan and Garrard – Kit’s best friend. Despite Captain Tennant’s request that they do not follow the same route up the South-West face, the party ignore his plea and continue as planned. Dr Pearce finds the jungle oppressive and dislikes the superstition and fear which surrounds the mountain. However, it is once they begin the climb that his unsettled feelings gradually turn to fear. Is he imagining things, or is there something - or someone - on the mountain, that is watching them?Why did I read this book: After hitting so many duds and meh reads lately, I decided that I was really in the mood for something dark and terrifying. I had completely forgotten that I had Dark Matter on my shelf, and then I remembered how much Ana loved the book when she read it last year. It seemed like the perfect time to give the book a read. Once we get further into the story, and higher up the mountain, the creepiness begins. At the start, there are just small occurrences of unease, a shadow at the edge of Stephen’s vision or the dark shape of a man further up the mountain. But as we read on, weirder things begin to happen. I loved the atmosphere Paver created in this novel, you can really lose yourself in scenario’s and feel the plummeting sense of fear and dread that plagues Stephen. Dark Matter is terrific. It is a ghost story, but it is also a metaphysical meditation on what lies beneath our little lives.” Paver includes a number of references to the author Robert Louis Stevenson. Firstly, the Stevenson screen is an instrument designed by Robert Louis Stevenson's father. Secondly, the character Gus Balfour's namesake comes from Robert Louis Stevenson's mother's maiden name; Balfour. This name is also shared by Stevenson's protagonist of his novel Kidnapped.

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Marianne has a dark history and a secret that she and her ex-boyfriend, Jesse, have kept for years. Now the pact they made is beginning to break, threatening her family and vulnerable daughter. Dark Matter is a speculative fiction novel from Michelle Paver. Part horror, part ghost story, it was published in the UK on October 21, 2010. [1] [2] Plot introduction [ edit ] Her fen, “alive with vast skeins of geese… the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia”, casts “a dim green subaqueous glimmer” over her story; Maud, poised between superstition and religion, is inexorably drawn to it. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. “‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.” Like all good heroines, Maud doesn’t listen. Michelle Paver's second series Gods and Warriors is set during the Bronze Age. It tells the story of Hylas, a 12-year-old goatherd, whose adventures take him to Ancient Crete and Ancient Egypt, and Pirra, the daughter of a high priestess with a crescent shaped scar on her cheek. The story crucially features animals in the plot – a lion, a falcon, and a dolphin; the dolphin from the first book, the lion from the second book onwards, and the falcon from the third book onwards.Paver develops these tensions very well. Then the gradual development of a sense of haunting, initially denied by the empirical Stephen: The story is simple, and unfolds with a sense of familiarity (which, somehow, only increases the level of dread). Michelle Paver understands the key to telling a ghost story – she plays within the confines of convention and doesn’t attempt to add any unnecessary embellishments or endless descriptive statements or gore (which, unfortunately, is an excess that many horror novels indulge in, much to their detriment). Rather, the tension and fear here is subliminal, creeping at an increasing rate to an inevitable crescendo of terror and tragedy. Plus, you can’t ever go wrong with a cabin/isolation story in an icy location ( The Thing, “Ice” from The X-Files, etc). A spooky and atmospheric ghost story, the Perfect reading material for dark October/November long dark nights. I am always on the look out for a good chilling style story at this time of year. I am not a fan of Horror and or guts and gore just a good old fashioned Ghost Story is what floats my boat. In the interim, she “took a bit of a wrong turn”, becoming a biotechnological patents lawyer for 13 years. “I thought, ‘I’m quite good at exams, why don’t I do law for a couple of years and maybe I’ll be published by then?’” After years of trying to write in the evenings and at weekends, and not really wanting to be a lawyer at all, she “had to jump off the treadmill”. She resigned without a book deal. During her six months’ notice period, she landed one. “My earnings fell off a cliff. I went from six figures to earning less than a student teacher. But it was unbelievable how much it felt like the right thing. I didn’t have to dress up in Armani trouser suits, I could just wear jeans.”

Dark Matter Audiobook - Michelle Paver - Listening Books Dark Matter Audiobook - Michelle Paver - Listening Books

Paver was in the middle of research for another adult novel – Wakenhyrst, about a lonely child growing up in the middle of the marshes in Edwardian Suffolk – so she had to put the germ of an idea for what would become Viper’s Daughter aside. But she’s no stranger to letting ideas percolate until they find their time: while studying biochemistry at Oxford in the late 70s, she found herself getting increasingly interested in writing and attempted a Mills & Boon. “It was absolute rubbish. I was so arrogant. I had complete contempt for Mills & Boon and thought it must be easy, so wrote it in three weeks and sent it in. Of course it got rejected.” Once the depleted team are truly on their own, the realisation that they are in such an isolated and desolate location really hits home . Now I love snow. I long for it with every fibre of my red blooded being. I yearn and strain to hear and see and feel it falling. Where I live in Poole we hardly ever get it and when the rest of the kingdom is cloaked in it we have the normal talcum powder sprinklings which somehow manages to bring all normal progress to a grinding halt or we have absolutely none whatsoever whilst radio and tv bangs on about blizzard conditions and the horror that is the white stuff everywhere else. Yet with all this unrequited or at least unsatisfied love affair with snow on my part Michelle Paver still managed to make even me a little unnerved by the idea of the chill and bleakness and paralysing loneliness of a snowed landscape.Author's press release (8 August 2009). "Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Sells A Million Copies!". Booktrade.info. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 . Retrieved 6 February 2011. {{ cite web}}: |author= has generic name ( help) I was especially impressed with Paver's ability to describe different aspects of the mountain's structure without making me yawn with boredom. I am immensely fascinated with the Artic so anytime I find a book set in the area, I snap them up. I also love a good ghost story so if you combine the two I'm in heaven! And that's exactly what you'll find in Dark Matter so I knew going into it, that it just had to be good. Michelle’s hotly-anticipated ghost story, DARK MATTER, has been published in the UK to massive critical acclaim. Thin Air: A Ghost Story fitted the bill perfectly for me, this is more the the sort of story that is eerie and chilling and unsettling as opposed to scary.