Peter Straub

Old friends try to come to grips with the darkness of the past--a secret ritual that left behind a gruesomely dismembered body--and find themselves face-to-face with the evil they helped create.

A Novel

A Dark Matter

Carol Bailey

The story revolves around an event that occurred in 1966 in Madison WI, when 4 teenage friends get caught up in an occult ritual performed by Spencer Malon; with whom they have become infatuated.

The narrator of the story is Lee Hayward, who was friends with the 4 and is now married to Lee Truax, one of the participants in the “Dark Matter”. The story is relayed from the perspective of each participant and how it’s shaped or damaged their respective lives, including that of the narrator.

Surprisingly, I found the storyline of this book difficult to follow; in part because of how it was narrated. I found it distracting trying to figure out when a character was relaying their memories of the incident, versus when they were having a present day conversation. This was especially true when the character “Hootie” was both remembering the events leading up to the day of the “Dark Matter” and reading the events as they were laid out in Lee Hayward’s book.

A Dark Matter A Novel

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