Set in the Himalayas, 1935. Five Englishmen set off from Darjeeling determined to conquer the sacred summit of Kangchenjunga. 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? I adored how Paver made the natural surroundings in the book of central importance to the characters: Stearne who fears the marsh and the fenland and Maud who feels truly herself when she is in the wildnerness of the fens, a forbidding place, but the only place she can truly be herself. Religion is an important aspect of the book, but nature is the true spirit in this book, where absolution and judgement takes place. Nature wins. I’ve been in the mood for a good ghost story for a while, and when another book blogger told me that Michelle Paver’s novel Dark Matter was not only suspenseful and spooky, but also set in a wild remote place, I didn’t need any more persuasion! And I must say that it lived up to all my expectations.

Paver's writing style managed to read like a diary or first person tale from an actual survivor of a mountain climbing disaster. She expertly set up a failed 1907 Lyell Expedition and explained the impact it had on climbers in the 1935 Cotterell expedition at hand. Because of this, combined with the likability of everyman narrator Stephen Pearce, I was pulled in from the beginning.Thin Air is an interesting book about a group that decides to climb Kangchenjunga in India. I was quite fascinated with the books premise. Horror stories that take place in isolated places are great and I was quite looking forward to being swept off my feet. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. I liked the story, but I didn't love it. There were interesting moments, but I just felt that I never really connected with either Stephen Pearce or his fellow travelers. I liked the idea that one of the men from the previous expedition was left behind and that Stephen Pearce felt haunted. But, it just never got really interesting. Dark Matter is terrific. It is a ghost story, but it is also a metaphysical meditation on what lies beneath our little lives.” Gruhuken is reportedly haunted, and hints as to why are skilfully drip-fed through a tense and strangely beautiful narrative that bristles with the static electricity of a stark, vast, frozen Arctic night * METRO * Enter Dark Matter, by the very talented Michelle Paver. Holy haunted bear post, Batman. This book is everything I have been looking for, and then some. This is a blood-curdling ghost story” agrees Victoria Moore in the Daily Mail, “evocative not just of icy northern wastes but of a mind as, trapped, it turns in on itself.”

When the summer is over and darkness sets in, you can truly visualise the derelict trappers hut, the ice, the snow and harsh landscape. The slowly building sense of dread in this book may not be for everyone. If you're looking for jump-in-your-face scares, you won't find any. I could (and did) read this book alone late at night. But if you're in the mood for a subtle buildup of terror, I think this is a great book. I don't know why I didn't see it coming but when Stephen was abandoned at Camp 3, it was awhile until I truly thought he was a goner and that all of his paranoid imaginings had actualized.. The ending answered all of my questions, which I always love in a thriller and a ghost story.Once more we are in a cold, secluded, location, the Hilamayas instead of the Arctic. At first glance, this is quite similar to her previous story but the feel is quite different. I would guess that this kind of tale requires a remote and dangerous setting, somewhere secluded and cut off the real world. Kangchenjunga, as well as other mountains, are places of wonder, where the immense scale becomes alien, and where euphoria morphs with desolation. Additionally, opting for the 1930s golden era of mountain climbing adds somehow that fashionable 'old' feel to it.

I needed to read this for a job I have. It is a ghost story, and a pretty successful one, judging by the fact that I had to sleep with the lights on for three days after. Either it's pretty good or I'm a pretty big wuss. It's about an expedition in the 1930s to the Arctic. Once the sun disappears entirely for the winter, they start seeing a man who walks the shore near their cabin. Nothing much more than that happens, there's not much gore, but it's still impressively scary * BOOKISH * We now learn of her father's sins in his own childhood as well as his view on married life and children through the diaries he keeps that young Maude keeps reading secretly. She learns things even more horrible than one might expect from the above description, believe me. 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. Michelle Paver is well known for her chilling ghost stories, but to me this one is more historical fiction with a crime element. There is still some suggestion of the supernatural in Wakenhyrst, but that element of ambiguity, where the rational explanation and the spooky one are equally plausible, just wasn’t present here. I was Team Rational all the way. This did not diminish the story for me at all, but other readers expecting a Paver haunting might be disappointed. But all that helped to enhance the atmosphere of the tale. It was more psychological than physical terror (except for what had been done to Maude's mother), as is usually the case in such books, and it worked really well.I loved this story. I couldn't put it down. It's as creepy as an M R James ghost story and yet, even though it's set in the 1930s, it doesn't feel self-consciously dated as many neo-Gothic stories do. It feels absolutely relevant. Not many people can write historical fiction without anachronism but with a contemporary feel and Michelle Paver is one of them. Dark Matter comes highly recommended * THE BOOK BAG *

Dark Matter is terrifying. The only novel to really get under my skin and infiltrate my nightmares.” Well what happens is that three men become one when one of them takes ill. (Yes, they're in communication with civilization via the 'wireless,' and yet civilization is several days away in any emergency.) Plus there might be a ghost? A spirit? Or is it just your imagination? And what about all those flensing knives they found buried in the ground? Ahhh .....This is a book written for the adult market but will be enjoyed just as much by many readers who fall within the so-called Young Adult age range. There is no bad language, no sex, no blood or gore - this is pure ghost story that relies on a mastery of the craft of writing to create a sense of lingering terror in the reader that will not go away easily once the book is finished * BOOKZONE4BOYS * You have plenty of time to clear your TBR piles to make room for this book as it won't be published until October, but make room you should as Michelle Paver's Dark Matter is a ghost story of terrific menace written with consummate skill * CORNFLOWER BOOKS * I've been meaning for a long time to write a review of this atmospheric and unsettling novel by Michelle Paver that I've read quite a few months ago. She manages to create a claustrophobic atmosphere in one of the greatest great outdoors there is. And it is not by blood and guts and grossness but by the gradual ratchetting up of tension as the hero, left alone, suddenly discovers that he is neither. He is not a hero, nor is he alone. And it is the uncovering of these horrifiying truths which gradually chills and frightens you as the reader. It is 1935 and our narrator, Dr Stephen Pearce, has left London, and the woman he was supposed to be marrying, to join his brother, Kit, on a mountaineering expedition. In 1906, Kit’s hero, Sir Edmund Lyell, led an expedition up Kangchenjunga, which ended in disaster. His book, “Bloody but Unbowed: the Assault on Mount Kangchenjunga,” presented Lyell as a hero; even though he and Charles Tennant, were the only survivors of a tragedy, which saw five members of the party perish in the attempt to climb the mountain.