A Dark Matter

It's good to keep faith in things you love. Even when those things closest to your heart turn that nasty shitty colour, you can't simply give up and walk away because sooner or later that shitty colour will wash out. The thing you loved won't be the same anymore, it will be different, maybe better, maybe worse but it will still be the thing you loved...

I'm not actually going anywhere highly emotional with this. I've started reading A Dark Matter by Peter Straub. The very same Peter Straub who wrote two of the finest pieces of supernatural fiction in the shape of Shadowland ('79) and Ghost Story ('80) and then tried to be serious until he co-wrote also notable The Talisman with Stephen King ('84) after which point, he just went 'bad'.

Nobody can explain why things like this happen. It may not even be the author - it may be the reader that changed but still, his output was so much not for me that I gave up and only dipped in and out to check that it was still not for me along the way.

Until today.

A Dark Matter is truly a return to form - one should never overuse that statement in case one needs to use it and actually mean it one day. I'm only about 100 pages in but either Straub has come home to roost or I have. I don't really care which. We shall probably never know the answer. All we need to know is that A Dark Matter seethes with weird and understated menace and will be finished in but a couple of days.

No. One should never lose faith - even through the darkest of days.

Uncharacteristically, I also really like the artwork on the cover of the UK and the US edition. This is a world's first.