The incantatory and deceptive powers of storytelling have always been central to Peter Straub’s novels. From the quartet of aging, dissembling raconteurs in Ghost Story (1979) to the lurid pageantry and masques of Shadowland (1980), Straub artfully layers and arranges smaller stories to construct what might be called a greater dread, and his odd and excellent new volume, A Dark Matter, furthers such narrative invention.

The book follows the efforts of a Straub-like horror novelist named Lee Harwell to piece together what really happened decades earlier when four of his childhood friends (one