12/25/2025
I read Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter because it is considered to be literary fiction. My blog is supposed to be which is mostly about literary fiction read some more literary fiction and review it. I love puzzles and mysteries in novels but I wasn’t able to get into this one. A Dark Matter ultimately proved frustrating and unsatisfying because the plot did not resolve itself in the way it was foreshadowed.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details may be given away.
A Dark Matter revolves around a group of high school friends in 1966 Madison, Wisconsin, who become entangled with a charismatic guru, Spencer Mallon, and participate in a mysterious ritual in a meadow. Decades later, the narrator—a successful novelist named Lee Harwell—revisits the event through interviews with the survivors, whose lives have been profoundly altered: one institutionalized, another blind, and others scarred by tragedy.
The book’s structure, which presents multiple perspectives on the same enigmatic incident. The Rashomon effect is the phenomenon of the unreliability of eyewitnesses. The effect is named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 Japanese film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses. In Spite of each character giving an account it’s impossible to get a clear picture of what happened. The guru then disappears for some unknown reason prophesizing that he’s going to disappear after the ritual.
The prose itself is one of the novel’s stronger aspects—Straub’s writing is elegant and atmospheric—but it did not resonate with me as powerfully as that of other authors whose style I find more poetic or engaging. Additionally, several elements grated: the narrator’s wife is repeatedly referred to as “the Eel” rather than her given name, which struck me as diminishing and disrespectful. The narrator’s pretensions—such as claiming expertise in Latin and ancient Greek—seemed like deliberate red herrings suggesting unreliability or delusion, yet the book never capitalizes on these cues.
I had hoped for a twist involving an unreliable narrator (perhaps even the narrator himself being institutionalized or imagining events), but no such revelation materializes, making the buildup feel misleading and unearned.
While I can understand why the novel appeals to some readers—its ambitious exploration of memory, trauma, and the unknowable has a certain literary allure—the excessive details and lack of narrative momentum made it tiresome rather than immersive. Overall, the strengths in style could not compensate for the frustrations in plot and payoff.
Macy Makes Magic 