“Dark Matter is brilliant” enthuses bestselling novelist Jeffery Deaver.  “Imagine Jack London meets Stephen King. The novel virtually defines a new genre: literary creepy. I loved it.”

“Compelling… direct… relentless” writes Helen Rumbelow in The Times.  “Dark Matter is terrific. It is a ghost story, but it is also a metaphysical meditation on what lies beneath our little lives.”

“It’s a spellbinding read” agrees Eric Brown in The Guardian.  “The kind of subtly unsettling, understated ghost story MR James might have written had he visited the Arctic.”

“The ultimate test of a good ghost story is, surely, whether you feel panicked reading it in bed at midnight” writes Emma John in The Observer. “Two-thirds through, I found myself suddenly afraid to look out of the windows, so I’ll call it a success!”

“This is a blood-curdling ghost story” agrees Victoria Moore in the Daily Mail, “evocative not just of icy northern wastes but of a mind as, trapped, it turns in on itself.”

“Paver has created a tale of terror and beauty and wonder” writes Suzi Feay in the Financial Times.  “Mission accomplished: at last, a story that makes you check you’ve locked all the doors, and leaves you very thankful indeed for the electric light. In a world of CGI-induced chills, a good old-fashioned ghost story can still clutch at the heart!”

“Jack becomes sure that an evil presence is trying to drive him away from Gruhuken” Joan Smith writes in the Sunday Times.  “Paver records his terror with compassion, convincing the reader that he believes everything he records while leaving open the possibility that his isolation – and the class barrier he feels so acutely – has made him peculiarly susceptible to emotional disturbance. The novel ends in tragedy that is as haunting as anything else in this deeply affecting tale of mental and physical isolation.”

“Paver is the mistress of suspense” agrees Amanda Craig in her review of children’s books for Halloween in The Times. “The strangeness that humans can suffer from when exposed to the Arctic wilderness is brilliantly exploited in this period piece.”

DARK MATTER deals with an expedition to the Arctic that goes badly wrong.  By a strange quirk of fate, the publisher’s promotional video for the book is eerily similar to film of another (real life) polar expedition that is premiered on the day of DARK MATTER’s launch.  The two videos are shown below.

Read about the writing of DARK MATTER here.

While I was writing DARK MATTER, I needed to get the feel of the polar night at first hand, so I went back to Spitsbergen in winter.  I went snowshoeing in the dark (with and without a headlamp), and climbed a glacier in driving snow and zero visibility. It was the time of the full moon, and because I was living Jack’s story in my head, I realized how paranoid he would be about the least shred of cloud drifting across the moon.

Also, I discovered a curious thing while I was out hiking.  Whenever I lagged behind a little, I kept hearing this strange “echo” effect: as if someone else in snowshoes were following me.  Doubtless it was no more than the echo of my own snowshoes, but it was distinctly unsettling.

“I got a sense of the unease you’d feel on entering a small, freezing cabin in the dark…”

As far as the huskies are concerned, I’d been dog-sledding before, in the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and Arctic Finland, and I did some more on my trip to Spitsbergen in the winter.  I also spent some time looking after the dogs: harnessing them, feeding them, and generally getting ideas for the characters of the dogs in the story.  Isaak is based on two in particular, to whom I got very attached: a young one called Borealis, who, like Isaak, was very enthusiastic and vocal; and a slightly more experienced dog called Mirak, who padded along with us on a snowshoe hike, and acted as a sort of canine early warning system for polar bears.

“The dead stillness of the dark months; the feeling of menace… I’ve felt this feeling too…”

In addition to this expedition, two other sources proved invaluable: the first was “A WOMAN IN THE POLAR NIGHT”, an account by a redoubtable trapper’s wife, Christiane Ritter, of her winter in northern Spitsbergen.  The second was “THE DIARY OF THORLEIF BJERTNES”, an even tougher Norwegian trapper who overwintered with two companions in 1934-5.

It’s remarkable that in all these accounts – the Oxford Expedition, Ritter, Bjertnes – there’s repeated mention of the uncanny effect of overwintering in Spitsbergen.  They talk of the dead stillness of the dark months; the feeling of menace; and the sense of otherworldliness and creeping unease.  I’ve felt this feeling too.  It’s the feeling you get when you’re far from camp, and not quite sure how to find your way back.  When the mountains loom suddenly large, and you get the uneasy sense that you’re being watched; when your mind creates images you’d rather not confront.  It’s this feeling that prompted me to write DARK MATTER.

We know so little about the world of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.  What weapons did they use?  What shelters did they build?  For their material culture, I’ve studied archaeology, but to fill in the numerous gaps, I’ve taken ideas from the ways of life of more recent traditional people, such as certain Inuit and American Indian peoples, the San of Africa, the Ainu of Japan, the Sami of Lapland, and certain central and south American tribes.

The term `hunter-gatherer’ can be misleading, evoking a picture of someone casually spotting a clump of berries and saying, `Oh, good, I think I’ll gather some of those’.  In fact, hunter-gatherers had to be experts about their world.  They had to know precisely when particular plants bore fruit or nuts; when the bark of different trees was at its best for making rope, where such trees could be found, and so on.  They had to be unbelievably skilled.  It’s as far from The Flintstones as you could possibly imagine.

But Torak’s world is about more than tracking prey and scraping hides.  How did they think?  Again, I’ve learnt from more modern hunter-gatherers, and at the outset I was struck by key differences in attitude between them and farming or pastoral societies:-

As hunter-gatherers travel often, they don’t tend to value possessions as much as we do.

They often don’t have a concept of owning land.  This means they attach less importance to inheriting property, so there’s less emphasis on marriage, and women tend to play a more equal role in society.

They value the qualities you need for hunting: patience, resilience, and the ability to listen (hence Torak being  “The Listener” in WOLF BROTHER).

Often they treat their weapon as a valued `hunting partner’, not just as an object (hence Renn and her bow).

But that’s just the bare bones of a society.  What did they believe about life and death, and where they came from?  The challenge has been to create an entire belief system for the clans.  Again, I’ve borrowed from the beliefs of more recent hunter-gatherers, then used my imagination to adapt them for the stories.  For instance:-

When Torak tracks his first kill in WOLF BROTHER, I’ve based this on how the San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari track their prey, identifying so closely with it that in their imagination they become the animal they are tracking.

To show how Torak perceives his world, I’ve used the rather eerie Sami idea that everything – including rocks, rivers and trees – is alive and has a spirit; not all of them can talk, but all can hear and think.

In the books, when a hunter kills an animal, he feels honour-bound to use every part of that animal (whether it’s for food, clothing, weapons, or shelter).  This is because of “The Pact”: the clans’ belief in an ancient bargain between themselves and the World Spirit, to the effect that they must treat the prey with respect, and in return, the World Spirit will send more prey.  I based this on the beliefs of the Nunamiut Eskmimos of northern Canada.  Similar beliefs are held by many hunter-gatherer peoples.

Torak’s antagonists in the books, the evil Soul-Eaters, were inspired by reading about shamanism.  In most hunter-gatherer cultures, there’s one member of the clan who is in touch with the spirit world, and who goes into a trance to visit it: to cure sickness, foretell the future, and so on.  Such people are often called shamans or witch-doctors.  Mostly they do good; but it occurred to me that as they’re very powerful people, if they did ever band together to do evil, they’d be a force to be reckoned with.  That’s the idea behind the Soul-Eaters.  (As an aside, what I find really alarming about the Soul-Eaters is that they don’t believe they are doing evil; they’re just utterly convinced that they’re right.)

I’ve also drawn on shamanism, and particularly on the experiences of Inuit and American Indian shamans, for Torak’s “spirit walking” – that is, when two of his souls leave his body and enter the body of another creature, so that, while remaining Torak, he experiences life as they do.

Many readers have found the most frightening creatures in the stories to be the tokoroths, the evil children possessed by demons.  I based this idea on certain African beliefs about monstrous creatures believed to have been created by witch-doctors, using children abducted in infancy and brought up in darkness, in an atmosphere of deep evil.  In Malawi, where I was born, these are called tokoloshe.  I simply changed the name a bit and added a demon or two.

I’ve tried hard to make Torak’s world accurate, and I’ve been delighted that the stories have met with favour in archaeological circles.  A few years ago, I was asked to open a special WOLF BROTHER display case at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  The Museum had taken excerpts from the book, and exhibited them alongside real archaeological artefacts mentioned in the story, such as flint blades, red ochre, etc.  I was delighted that the book has been so honoured, and I’ve since been back to enjoy the Museum’s subsequent display cases for later books in the series.

For Wolf Brother, I rode a total of 300 miles in the forests of north-eastern Finland and northern Lapland. Among other things:-

• I slept on reindeer skins in a traditional open-fronted Finnish shelter called a laavu (surprisingly warm, despite a ground-frost!).
• I ate elk heart, reindeer, forest berries and spruce resin (which in the Stone Age was used as a kind of antiseptic chewing-gum; I can confirm that it tastes like cough medicine).
• I studied traditional Sami (Lapp) methods for preparing reindeer hides, including learning which parts of the hide are best for making different kinds of clothing (eg shin-hide for boots).
• I picked up forest beliefs and customs from people who’ve lived there for generations, such as how to carry fire in a roll of bark.
• I tried out a traditional birchbark horn (and was told that my attempt sounded like an angry elk).
• I peered into the mouth of a very large brown bear to find out what colour it was (a dark greyish purple – and that wasn’t because he’d been eating blueberries!). But I admit, the bear was behind a fence when I did this.
• I had my first sight of the Aurora borealis, which I found every bit as awe-inspiring as Torak and Renn.

At times, some of this research was very far from comfortable, but even the uncomfortable bits – for example, getting freezing hands and feet on one dismal, sleety ride in Lapland – were crucial, because they impressed on me the importance of keeping my hero warm and dry!

Since I was a child, I’ve read everything I could find about wolves, and the wolf talk which Torak uses is as close as I can get to real wolf talk.  For example, when he asks Wolf to play, or muzzle-grabs him when he’s a cub, that’s how a real wolf might invite play, or discipline a pesky cub.

However as regards the language which Wolf himself uses in the parts of the story told from his point of view, I arrived at this by knowing something about how wolves perceive the world, and then imagining how Wolf would think and feel in a given situation.  In other words, I had to get inside Wolf’s mind: to experience the Forest through his eyes – and more importantly, through his nose and ears.

For instance at the start of WOLF BROTHER, I knew that when he first meets Torak, Wolf mistakes him for another wolf, because of the strip of wolf skin which Torak wears on his jerkin.  I realized that Wolf would regard Torak as a special kind of wolf – albeit a strange one, with complicated forepaws and the puzzling lack of a tail: hence Wolf’s name for him, “Tall Tailless”.

However, I always bear in mind that although Wolf can be endearing, particularly when he’s a cub, he is also an authentic wolf – and therefore, even to Torak, in some ways ultimately unknowable.

As with any research, you can only get you so far with books, and I would never have been able to bring Wolf truly alive if I hadn’t got to know some real wolves.  This I’ve done over the years by befriending the wolves at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust in Berkshire (www.ukwolf.org).  It’s been a privilege to get to know these wolves, and I’m hugely grateful to the Trust for helping to make this possible.

The wolves at the Trust are not wild, as they’ve been brought up from an early age in proximity with people (their devoted volunteer handlers).  However they aren’t tame, either, because you can’t tame a wolf, so you need to know a bit about wolf etiquette when you approach them: for instance, talking softly and reassuringly, not staring directly into their eyes, and not patting them on the head.

Over the years, I’ve got to know three wolves particularly well, as I’ve known them since they were tiny cubs (see OUTCAST research).  Over the years, I’ve watched Torak and his step-sisters Mai and Mosi grow from small bundles of fluff to big, happy, healthy wolves.  They’ve inspired me in so many ways: from the little things – as when I watched a wolf clean her teeth by running a bramble branch through her jaws – to bigger things, as when one of the wolves had to have the tip of her tail amputated, which gave me an idea for a major episode in SOUL EATER.

I’m honoured to be a Patron of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, whose aims are:-

• To enhance conservation, scientific knowledge and public awareness of wolves.
• To improve their chances of survival in the wild.
• To run education programmes for schools, conservation and other organisations; and
• To provide opportunities for behavioural research, and for people to interact with wolves.

To experience the Seal Islands, I travelled to the Lofoten islands of north-west Norway.  Like Torak, I went at Midsummer, which is a very strange time in the north, because it doesn’t get dark.  I found it unnerving to wander the hills and beaches at midnight in the blazing sun.  And it meant that when I came upon the locations for parts of the story – the Seal Clan camp, the lake, the little white beach, Renn’s camp – I saw them, quite literally, in a new light.  But that’s what happens when I’m on a research trip: I live the story with Torak, Renn and Wolf.  Sometimes, I even catch glimpses of them.

Like Torak, I was awed by the towering cliffs which rise straight out of the sea, with the white-tailed eagles wheeling overhead.  Like him, I was disoriented by the constant sunlight, and I missed the Forest.  And like Torak, Renn and Wolf, I got lost in the sea-mists which arise without warning, seeping eerily up the beaches to mingle with the clouds pouring down over the clifftops.

After the Lofotens, I went to Greenland, to learn traditional Inuit ways of survival.  I studied how the Inuit made their skinboats and shelters out of whalebone and seal-hide.  I learned about the Inuit medicine men and women, or angakkuk, who wore wide belts hung with bones, teeth, and seabirds’ beaks; this gave me the idea for Tenris’ magnificent belt.  And I learned, too, about gutskin: a beautiful, translucent material which until then I hadn’t known existed – and which also became part of the story.

Since I knew that Torak would have to eat the Seal Clan’s unfamiliar food, I tried some, in the form of traditional Inuit food.  The mussels and seaweed plucked straight from the shore-side rocks were delicious.  And stewed seal meat was good, too; as was stone-fried whale meat.  But I have to say that I found raw seal blubber (ie fat) a bit of an effort to get down.  The same goes for mattak, which is raw whale skin with a lining of blubber: chewy, fatty, and slightly sweet.

Still, trying new things is part of research, and I just told myself that this is what many Greenlanders eat every day, and what Torak eats when he’s with the Seal Clan.  (And by the way, the whales and seals eaten in Greenland aren’t endangered species; they’re sustainably hunted, and the Greenlanders make use of the whole carcass, like the clans in Torak’s world.)

Of all the research, though, the most unforgettable was when I got close to the killer whales.

One of the best places for seeing killer whales is a remote Norwegian fjord, north of the Arctic circle.  It’s the second deepest fjord in Norway, and every year, at the start of winter, vast shoals of herring – millions of tons of them – come to shelter in it, closely followed by about seven hundred killer whales.

On the first day, I was lucky enough to watch the whales feeding in their unique “carousel” formation.  It’s eerie to watch, because at first all you can see is a big circle of water slowly turning pale green as the herring rise to the surface.  But you know that the whales are somewhere down below, driving the fish upwards.  Suddenly, the fish break the surface, in a doomed bid to escape.  The sea is boiling with fish, and now the sky is full of seagulls and eagles, and finally the great black fins of the killer whales surface…

That experience in itself would have been enough for me, but I had the chance to go further: to get into the water and swim with the whales.  And as Torak was going to be doing it, I knew that I had to do it, too.

It’s fair to say that I was a bit apprehensive, but I just told myself that these particular killer whales only went for herring, and I don’t look much like one, so the chances were, they wouldn’t bother me.  Besides, when the moment came, there wasn’t a lot of time for nerves.  We’d spotted a pod of killer whales feeding a short distance away, and followed it in our motorized rubber dinghy.  Suddenly the moment came, and so – in dry-suit and snorkel – I slid over the side of the dinghy.

With amazing speed, the current pulled me away from the dinghy, and I was alone: floating face-down, staring into the luminous green sea.

My first impression came as a total surprise.  I found to my amazement that, because of all the layers of clothing I was wearing under my dry-suit, this freezing Arctic fjord felt like being in a warm bath.  And as I floated there, I had a sudden insight into what it’s actually like to be a whale or a seal.  You’re buoyed up by this beautiful green water, and with all your layers of blubber you’re beautifully warm, and moving about is so easy!  No wonder they like playing!  This was when I truly began to understand what it’s like for Torak when he spirit walks in the seal.  And this is why I go on research trips: because so often, they reveal things which I couldn’t possibly have imagined if I’d stayed at home.

But as I floated there, I still couldn’t actually see anything; just beautiful, green water.  Oh well, I thought, stifling my disappointment.  At least I can hear them: a magical whistling and clicking, as they talked to each other in their mysterious, underwater whale talk.

Then – just as I’d given up hope – a huge male killer whale swam directly beneath me.  He was only about twenty feet down, so I could clearly see his big black dorsal fin, and his black-and-white markings.  I didn’t have time to be scared.  Besides, he was ignoring me – although I could tell that he knew I was there, because I could hear him clicking: checking me out by echolocation.

My overriding impression was of how fast he was going: faster than an outboard motor.  He was powering past me at incredible speed.  It only lasted a few seconds – and then he was gone.  But I’ll never forget it.  I felt so privileged to be sharing his Sea with him, even for a little while.  And just like Torak and the Seal Clan, I felt such awe, such respect, for these magnificent creatures.

Picture by GrayWolvexxX from The Clan

For Soul Eater, Torak must journey in winter to the frozen wastes of the Far North, where the Ice clans teach him vital secrets of snow survival.

For research, I spent time in north-east Greenland in winter, where I experienced at first hand the power of wind and snow, watched glaciers calving and icebergs crashing into each other, and took several husky sled trips Greenland-style (racing as fast as the dogs could go over hills, frozen lakes, anything in their path).

To experience the forest in winter, I hiked in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania (Romania), and found the tracks of badger, weasel, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, lynx, and wolf (the bears were still hibernating).
In Transylvania, too, I learned from my guide, a wolf and raven researcher, how to fake a wolf kill so as to attract ravens  which proved useful in the story.

In southern Greenland    (summer I caught my first sight of a polar bear. I was hiking alone, an hour’s walk from the tiny settlement where I’d been staying, when I saw the unmistakeable white shape of a polar bear in the distance. Luckily I was downwind, and made a hasty retreat to the settlement before the bear caught my scent; but I’ll never forget the heart-lurching moment when I spotted that long white neck stretching upwards to snuff the wind.

As polar bears would be important in the story, I went to the small settlement of Churchill, Manitoba (northern Canada) in winter to watch them under slightly less perilous conditions. In early winter, polar bears gather on the tundra around Churchill, waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze over, so they can go and hunt seal. From a tundra buggy (like a large truck with an outside, open-air viewing platform), I watched wild polar bears by night and day, and got nose-to-nose with several through the grille of the platform. I’ll never forget the haunting feeling of gazing into those dark, strangely innocent eyes.

I also studied traditional Inuit and Sami (Lapp) methods of cold-weather survival in Greenland, Finnish Lapland, and North Norway, to gain insights into how Torak’s people lived: including their cold-weather clothing made of reindeer and seal hide and birdskin (I now keep a pair of Inuit reindeer-hide gauntlets in my freezer; it’s the best place to store them, as otherwise they shed) ; and Inuit seal-hunting techniques and whole-carcass usage (which involved my sampling raw seal liver in southern Greenland; it’s still traditional in some areas to taste a bit of the seal as soon as the animal has been killed).