Dark Matter
A Novel
-
-
4.4 • 3.4K Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! • NOW STREAMING ON APPLE TV+
A “mind-blowing” (Entertainment Weekly) speculative thriller about an ordinary man who awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew—from the author of Upgrade, Recursion, and the Wayward Pines trilogy
“Are you happy with your life?”
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious.
Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.
Before a man he’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college professor but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
Is it this life or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how will Jason make it back to the family he loves?
From the bestselling author Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is a mind-bending thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Blake Crouch takes every wisecrack about life in a parallel universe and makes it unnervingly literal. When scientist Jason Dessen finds himself forced into an alternate reality, the world is very different from how he knew it. But when Dessen tries to get back to his own world, the pressure kicks in, and soon he’s stumbling through one alternate reality after another, pursued by an implacable enemy. Crouch peppers this addictive, thrilling sci-fi story with action scenes that are beyond tense, making you cringe even as you’re dying to see what comes next.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Excellent characterization and well-crafted tension do much to redeem the outlandish plot of this SF thriller from Crouch (the Wayward Pines trilogy). Jason Dessen, a quantum physicist, once had a brilliant research career ahead of him. But after a girlfriend's unexpected pregnancy and the birth of a son, this future was derailed. Now Jason is a professor at a small Chicago college, content with his warm and loving family life until he's abducted into a world in which his quantum many-worlds theory has become a fully realized technology for inter-dimensional transfer. In this world, Jason didn't marry his girlfriend and never had a son. Jason is determined to get back to his family and his own world, but nefarious powers in the alternate reality conspire to stop him from revealing the criminal lengths they have gone to create the world-hopping technology. Crouch makes little attempt to justify the underlying science fiction MacGuffin, but a rousing and heartfelt ending will leave readers cheering.
Customer Reviews
Read only the sample and I NEED MORE!
Exciting and packed with action. And that was only in the first 120 pages! I definitely plan on reading the book next & judging by the sample, I can already recommend! Brilliant!
It’s been done better
The main character’s decisions annoyed me, and I almost dropped it a few times. In a universe of infinite possibilities, he chooses to do the same thing over and over again and run out of resources. Hard to sympathize with a fool.
Read the Midnight Library by Matt Haig for a similar concept but better execution.
GREAT STORY
Excellent. I finished it almost all at once. Gripping.