A Dark Matter by Peter Straub

 

I read this book something more than a decade ago, so I'd forgotten how very excellent it is. It's one POV character collecting the stories of his wife and several of their friends of the time everyone but the narrator spent in the thrall of a typical--stereotypical, even--charlatan-guru in the 1960s. None of them seem to have seen everything--though there's one who saw more than the others--and it's up to the reader to put together whatever sort of real story there is. Unless I missed something, this is the last novel Straub wrote, and it's a helluva last novel, deeply dark and staggeringly complex.