On Peter Straub's A DARK MATTER

I've loved the writing of Peter Straub since the publication of his epic horror tale GHOST STORY back in the seventies. After reading that classy and scary novel, I searched some of his older works, discovered IF YOU COULD SEE WHAT I HEAR, and have read that spooky, out of the way tale two or three times over the years. Another one of my favorite Straub books is FLOATING DRAGON, which is a little more mainstream spooky. I also like THE TALISMAN and BLACK HOUSE, on which he collaborated with Stephen King, although I've talked to a lot of people who don't care for those two efforts by the masters.

Peter Straub's style is elegant. His books have always seemed to me to be the work of both a poet and a scholar. So I was surprised to be disappointed with A DARK MATTER, his latest novel. In this Rashomon-like tale, four people, getting close to old age, tell their individual stories of the horrible event, the "dark matter," that all were involved in back in 1966, and which has haunted them until the present time. The prose is elegant. Reading it, I could sense that wonderful combination of poet and scholar. But ultimately, after 397 pages, I found I didn't care what this book had to say.

Perhaps, my initial disappointment came from the fact that I didn't really care about anyone in the story. I should have, as they are my contemporaries, but I didn't, and I didn't really believe in them, either. In A DARK MATTER, four high school friends, with the troublingly cute nicknames of Hootie, Dill, Boats, and Eel, and 2 college frat boys are pulled in by the charisma of a handsome and charming guru of cosmic change named Spencer Mallon. This guy has a Cinque-Manson-Jones kind of hold on the kids, and he bears the deep message summarized for him by the story "The Lady or the Tiger?" The message is this: Once you pick a door, no matter which you choose, you are aware of where the lady is and where the tiger is. Therefore, you have answered the central question of the title, and it makes no difference if you're squeezing a princess or getting devoured, you were successful in this quest. This, I guess, is so existential, (later it is mentioned that there is no difference between a pile of broken dolls or a pile of dead children), that the easily led sixties kids are swept right into this Mallon statement's "deepness."

Mallon entrances them, then prepares them, and finally takes them to a field where he is sure that a sort of parallel world is just waiting to be opened by their joint presences. Of course, it works. One college kid gets killed by a hulking, horrible, evil beast, (he deserves it as he's a serial killer in training) and the other college kid gets sucked through an opening between the worlds that he picked at like some cosmic scab. Hootie, Dill, Boats, and Eel all have their own special visions in the field, which screw them up in different ways, and which they never share until the end of the book, some 40 years after the "matter." Remember these visions took place in the 60's so, they are pretty trippy, but not a bit scary, and really disappointing.

The most important and true vision is the one that the Eel had. This is ironically destined before we hear her description of it, because of the way the vision screwed her up. It made her blind. Vision causes no vision. Get it? And don't blind characters often see things more clearly than the sighted characters. I need to question Eel's nickname at this point. Supposedly, she is the most beautiful, charming girl any of the boys have ever met, so why in God's name would they nickname her something disgusting like "Eel." Well, I'll tell you why. It's because both "Eel" and her boyfriend at the time, who becomes her husband later, have the first name "Lee." So they call the guy "Lee" and the girl "Eel," or sometimes, they call them "the twins." "LEE EEL!" If Straub wants so much to use this palindromic combination, then nickname the guy "Eel" after some slithery, disgusting water snake not the gorgeous girl. Or wait--could the Eel be an "Eve" symbol, ergo snaky, at the dawn of a new world order? I don't know. . . or sadly care. I should now tell you about Lee, the Eel's husband, who didn't get charmed by Mallon in the beginning, but who is writing a book about what happened to them all. But I'm not going to because he's a boring putz.

As I have gone on too long, let me conclude with what I believe to be the novel's final theme statement, a theme which the Eel discovers during her vision in the field. It is this: the opposite of love isn't hate; the opposite of love is evil, of which hate is only one of many subsets. It's a good theme. I, too, believe in love, which I know sounds like a song title. I just didn't need 397 pages to reveal it. Maybe a good short story. Or maybe it's like what Stephen King said in the little plug he gives A DARK MATTER on the novel's back cover. He says that the "high school students in the turbulent sixties. . . stumble into horrors far beyond their understanding." Maybe that's what happened to me, too. . . maybe it was beyond my understanding. . . because I just didn't get it.