Dark Matter: A Ghost Story

"Sure. So this is a cool one, because it uses a historical time point—the late 1930s—primarily to create atmosphere. The main character, Jack Miller, is a lower-middle-class clerk in the government. He’s pretty bored with his job, and he links up with some more upper-class Oxford graduate types who are going on an expedition to the Arctic. He joins them as their radio man. They go to Gruhuken, a former mine in Spitsbergen. Jack’s left alone when one of their group falls ill, and they have to take this member back to civilisation to get treatment. Jack stays with the radio in a cabin on the coast. As the darkness and isolation set in, his sanity begins to erode, and he starts having strange encounters with a ghostly figure. He finds out from a wandering trapper that there was some pretty intense violence in the area’s past—one of the miners was abused and beaten to death by his colleagues—and things escalate from there. The ghost can be seen as literalization of how transgressions mark places, but a ghost could make that point in a contemporary setting as well. What we get from the decision to place the story in the 1930s is a kind of isolation that’s difficult to imagine in modern times. You’d have cellphone coverage. Something. Whereas this historical setting puts Jack totally off on his own. The book is another example of how well historical fiction blends with other genres. It has zero gore or anything you would classically associate with horror in its more extreme forms. It just builds dread in a really effective way. It’s a really good, classical ghost story. To boot, the writing is beautiful. Pre-industrial revolution populations were more rural. That’s where the work was. There were labour camps extracting resources from the land. And when you’re trying to make settings in a book, if you get pulled out of a major urban centre, then you’re in the wilderness. There’s no in between. They didn’t have the suburbs in the way we do now. I guess they’re a postwar phenomenon, and that’s probably true of Europe as well. Part of the myth making of North America is just how huge the land is. A lot of other places too, of course. Even now, in Canada, the bulk of our development is on the border with the States. As you go farther and farther north, you get these wider and wider tracts of land. Almost by necessity, when writing historical fiction, you wind up having to learn and think about these areas because they’re part of the story a culture tells about itself, and you want to come at them same as you would the politics and economics of a time, even the clothes and food. Definitely. I had a lot of fun with it. My book starts in Montreal, then moves to the Great Lakes. It has a section on Mackinac Island, then it goes to York, which is present-day Toronto, then back to Montreal. Whenever the characters are in these liminal wilderness places, reality really does untether a bit. The various beliefs they have, some of which are European and some of which they’ve picked up interacting with indigenous people, kind of coalesce. A Christian might be worried about werewolves— loups-garous in French—and angry gods or spirits. A lot of the characters are very quickly humbled by the size of the place around them and the fantastical creatures that it might produce. When they get back into settlements, into houses and buildings, they get a little more smug and confident again. Those fears just slip away."