Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

So many recommendations and good reviews so I thought I would give this one a spin, and it probably falls under the heading of  "biggest disappointment of the year".  Michelle Paver is a children's writer, and I'm sorry to say that it really shows.   It is as if she has set out with a warning from her publishers not to frighten anybody too badly, and there's no chance of any bad dreams being initiated by this novel.

An amateur research team set out for the Arctic wilderness, and a string of misadventures reduces their number to one who carries on the project while waiting for the others to join back up with him.  He feels lonely.  He thinks he sees a ghost.  Someone tells him the place is haunted.  He does see a ghost.  He runs away from the ghost.

The research is thorough and unfortunately, it tends to show - Paver doesn't miss many opportunities to shoehorn in a brand name, or a contemporary reference.  But good research doen't necessarily make for good storytelling, and not for good adult storytelling. There is insufficient tension, the pace is frightfully slow, there is little real sense of menace, the "reveal" is in a dream, and even then only fitfully related so that the true horror is
so concealed as to be almost Lovecraftian, and not in a goosd way - you know how HPL was fond of saying that things were so gruesome that he couldn't describe them?  Well, a bit like that.

Unputdownability : I only didn't put it down because I so dreaded having to pick it back up again.