A Dark Matter

Starred review from December 21, 2009
In this tour de force from bestseller Straub (In the Night Room
), four high school friends in 1966 Madison, Wis.—Hootie Bly, Dilly Olson, Jason Boatman, and Lee Truax—fall under the spell of charismatic “wandering guru” Spencer Mallon. During an occult ceremony in which Mallon attempts to break through to a higher reality, something goes horribly awry leaving one participant dead. Decades later, Lee's writer husband interviews the quartet to find out what happened. In Roshomon-like fashion, each relates a slightly different account of the trauma they experienced. Straub masterfully shows how the disappointments, downturns, and failed promise of the four friends' lives may have stemmed from this youthful experience, and suggests, by extension, that the malignant evil they helped unleash into the world has tainted all hope ever since. Brilliant in its orchestration and provocative in its speculations, this novel ranks as one of the finest tales of modern horror.

December 15, 2009
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 Big Whatsit 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.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2009
Forty years after a horrific event experienced by a group of high school seniors, the now middle-aged participants individually review what happened. In 1960, under the spell of a charismatic, slightly older man who claimed special powers, the teens had been led to share what may have been a delusion or an actual, spectacular murder. The author's well-recognized skill in building suspense and subtly revealing aspects of character strengthens this complex plot. The basic questionis evil innately human, or is it something external?is appropriately and perhaps disturbingly left for the reader's speculation. While hints of the presence of supernatural beings are dropped frequently, there are repeated but only brief mentions of bloody slaughter rather than the extensive juicy depictions that TV and videogame addicts might expect. VERDICT Bram Stoker Award winner Straub's ("Ghost Story; Lost Boy; Lost Girl") latest offering in new wave horror will thrill his many fans and attract new readers. A very good choice for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/09.]Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ. at Stanislaus, Stockton

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2009
Student demos and cop riots werent the only spectacular events in Madison, Wisconsin, back in 1966. A footloose occultist guru blew into town and gathered a following of four high-school seniors and two UW frat boys, eventually to join him and his blonde-stunner girlfriend in a ritual in a disused field belonging to the ag school. The ceremony succeeded, but killed one collegian, made the other disappear, and drastically altered each of the high-schoolers lives. Four decades later, novelist Lee Harwell, whose girlfriend and eventual wife was one of the four high-schoolers, and who might have been in the field that day but for his profound skepticism of the guru, is jogged by a most un-Proustian memory-trigger into finding out from each of his old pals just what happened and writing it up. Hence, this book is rich with well-realized characters and incidents, and as dazzling a literary performance as anything Straub has ever written. Particularly impressive this time is the way Straub alters the texture of the prose as Harwells research progresses from initial murk through successively clearer atmospheres and brighter tones until, just before the last eyewitness testimony, his wifes, its almost too shiny and slick. Then, with her account, which partially remystifies things, the book ends in the normal, reassuring light of day. Quite a performance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)