Blake Crouch

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

"Are you happy with your life?"

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason'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 physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that's the dream?

And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter

A science-fiction thriller in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious, and awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew.

A Novel

IM OBSESSED WITH THEIR RELATIONSHIP. im so used to literary works when if the characters had the chance to cheat, they would. but his words beforehand, >But it won't be me<, rings so clearly here. both of them have their principles, and it does waver - how can it not, when you're both the only person you know in this situation rn? - but they are principled enough to not do it. to let it go. you choose to act on it. but they didn't. & she did help him over that final hurdle, my god.

madina

Jason, I wish you nothing but happiness. Be safe. Amanda

Charlie stares up at me in the firelight, asks, “Are you okay, Dad?”

“No. Not really. But I’m with you guys now. That’s all that matters. This other version of me…you liked him?”

I sit in bed watching the daylight fade over Chicago.

Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there’s a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening—polarized and golden—that I can only describe as loss.

"Your father said to me one night—never forget it—that pure research is life-consuming. He said…” For a moment, and to my surprise, emotion overtakes her. Her eyes mist, and she shakes her head like she always does when she’s about to cry. At the last second, she rallies, pushes through. “He said, ‘Daniela, on my deathbed I would rather have memories of you than of a cold, sterile lab.’ ” 

I look at Charlie, catch him rolling his eyes as he sketches. 

Probably embarrassed by our display of parental melodrama. 

I stare into the cabinet and wait for the ache in my throat to go away.

Natalie Sypeck 

'Are you happy in your life?'Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he wakes to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before the 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 physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.Is it this world or the other that's the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined - one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.From the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy, Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human - a relentlessly surprising thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.

Kavi priya

Abdullah

ok, so. I started off really liking this book. I liked the pacing, the story, all the science stuff etc. I liked how information was given to you in a very easy and natural way. The concept was really nice and had a really unique and original spin on it that I liked. As the book progressed, I don't why but it just got a bit meh for me. But, the last few pages were really good with all the suspense and stuff though it still had some issues.  This is a solid read if you're new to sci-fi because it's very readable pacing wise.
I liked the direct writing but still it had some problems. 

(I predicted the first twist. I felt very cool at the time but got to know some other people predicted it too. I'm not saying the book is very predictable, it just has some really nice hints that you can put together to guess something which was fun) 

 If you liked this, check out DARK on Netflix!!! :)

I found this weirdly predictable yet engaging.

Brianna

dija

This book FUCKED with my mind it made me feel so dumb lmao

Midori Kobayashi

reread two years later and i still like it as much as last time. maybe it's something about the concept of multiple lives that always gets to me... but it does work!

Emotional. Sci-fi with a slightly more emotional resonant concept of the multiverse 

Chris Mock

Shona Tiger

Not perfect, but such a great read! I read Recursion first, and it feels like the books are very similar.

Sade A

"All your life you're told you're unique. An Individual. That no one on the planet is just like you. It's humanity anthem"

WOW!!! OMG!! This book is incredible. Complete mind trip. You may think you'd be able to predict what happens in this book but i can assure you, Blake Crouch totally blindsides you with the story. At a point while reading, i'd scoffed at the book and said this was eerily like the movie, Total Recall and Face Off (sort of) If you've seen both movies you can sort of see echoes of the two movies woven albeit loosely in this book. But hot damn, Blake Crouch proved me wrong. 

Maybe the only con with this novel was the scientific jargon. You get the gist in the end but phew, it's taxing.
Anyways it was a really great book and if you think you can predict how it ends, probability is you're wrong.
P.S i thought the first 2 lines of Robert Burn's The Road not taken captures this book perfectly. 
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both

Enjoy this novel. It's AMAZING!!

Leah B

MY RATING⇢ 4.8 STARS | GRADE A

FEATURING⇢

Blake Crouch Kind-of-Trippy
Science Fiction
Mind-Fucking/Defining
With A Love Story

With Audio Performed by Jon Lindstrom

MY THOUGHTS⇢

Blake Crouch has a way of taking you for a ride...one wild and crazy ride with thought-provoking situations and dilemma's that leave you contemplating the meaning of life and love and the pursuit of happiness and such.  He also does science fiction in a way that is easily digestible. 

For the sake of a Reading Challenge (Halloween Bingo), I went into this knowing certain aspects of it, and I don't believe knowing that ruined the story...because ultimately I didn't really know where this was going to end up.   I just kind of let it take me where it would...and wow the taking was intense, especially that ending.  I would have really loved to know what happened to Amanda, though.

The Audio was excellently executed by Jon Lindstrom, who is also an actor, and it shows...he was amazing, really brought the story to life.  FYI, this would be amazing as a TV Show, or a Movie, but I don't think a movie could really get the scope of it.


THE BREAKDOWN⇢  

Plot⇢ 5/5
Narration Performance⇢ 5/5
Characters⇢ 4.8/5
The Feels⇢ 4.7/5
Pacing⇢ 5/5
Addictiveness⇢ 4.7/5
Theme or Tone⇢ 5/5
Flow (Writing Style)⇢ 5/5
Backdrop (World Building)⇢ 5/5
Originality⇢ 4.5/5
Ending⇢ 4.8/5 Cliffhanger⇢ I don't even know how to answer that...
_____

Book Cover⇢ It's trippy...
Setting⇢ Chicago
Source⇢ Libby Audiobook (Library)
Length⇢ 10 hours, 9 minutes

Jesse J. Anderson

I knew nothing more than the main character, but I felt light years ahead of him for half of the book. The third act was intense and made it worth the read though. Bummed about some dissatisfying loose ends.

Absolutely loved this book. Went places I didn't expect and never lost my attention. So good.

Cheri Fuller

The way I tore through this book... This was a fascinating premise that only gets crazier the more you read. I wasn't the biggest fan of Jason, but the overall plot made it easy to ignore how annoying he was. I don't think that I, personally, after I trudging through 40+ realities to get back to my original reality, would really give a fuck if my spouse slept with another version of me (

Overall, I think Dark Matter was an interesting take on identity, regret and a multiverse of opportunity. 

Alli

The way I tore through this book... This was a fascinating premise that only gets crazier the more you read. I wasn't the biggest fan of Jason, but the overall plot made it easy to ignore how annoying he was. I don't think that I, personally, after I trudging through 40+ realities to get back to my original reality, would really give a fuck if my spouse slept with another version of me (unknowingly), but I'm not Jason so... 

Overall, I think Dark Matter was an interesting take on identity, regret and a multiverse of opportunity. 

Jeannette Ordas

A fun, fast read mystery involving quantum physics but, you know, way more fun than that sounds. It's a goofy story but it's also totally compelling and it seems like it's made to be a movie. Gripping enough to read practically all in one sitting due to some insomnia.

Keernan Lanismore

A great read. And very thought provoking. I also sense it will forever change how I think about the universe and infinity.

Alexandra Sklar

Fun story. A little flat, but good for what it was.

Ryan LaFerney

What would you do if your doppelganger kidnapped you and trapped you in the multiverse? Would you fear you would never make it back to the family you love? What would you do to get back to your former life?

Dark Matter is a mind-bending and exciting sci-fi thriller that deals with these complex questions.

Siya S

Unpopular opinion: this book is good but maybe not THAT good. The overall theme is great, mysterious and ambitious and exciting, I get it. I get why people are crazy over this, the plot mindfucks them, sure, but I wish it could be more suspenseful and less like a diary kept by a lovesick middle age guy. 

For one thing, I don't really like the writing style, where at times I feel like it's more tell than show (and we all know it should be the other way around). 

Also, I wanted to like Jason but man wasn't he a bit...clingy and obsessive with his wife? I know love and all but it would be great if we could make it more subtle and not creepy. I'm sure Daniela was a great lady but please I don't think I need to read about it every other 5 sentences. Amanda, on the other hand, was pretty great addition to the story.

Woah. This book completely sucked me in. It takes you on a WILD ride full of super geeky science/physics stuffs that I didn’t completely understand but I got the gist of AND had me rooting for Jason to find his way back to his family. It was such a fun and easy read for me. Four stars bc I really feel like there could have been a better ending of Amanda. I just did not like how she just left. But the rest of the story was just truly SO GOOD.

BROOKE A

Pei Ting

Janice Hopper

Oh man, how do I write about this book? Gonna mark it spoilerific, because of something occurred to me as I was writing this.

First off, I think it was well written. It's a story about venturing down different legs of the Trousers of Time (h/t PTerry!) if the ToT were worn by a millipede with an infinite number of legs. Ok so far. I can enjoy stories of the multiverse. But the original Jason has to be one of the most frustrating characters to read about since Donaldson's Thomas Covenant. Covenant refused to believe in the reality of the other world he landed in at first, and caused a LOT of harm thereby. The original Jason could never seem to distinguish people in the alternate versions of his world from the people in his ORIGINAL world either. This also made him act inappropriately in some cases, and caused harm. I kept saying "For Og's sake, man, THIS ISN'T *YOUR* FAMILY. WHY ARE YOU ACTING SO STUPID????"

I really thought the author had written himself into a corner at the end, with all the Jasons that had branched off from other timelines returning home. He got out of that cul1 de sac. But here's what I thought about as I started this review: We know that Jason2 (the one who usurped OrigJason's life) had been looking for the best possible life for a Jason in the multiverse. He'd been watching OrigJason and his family. Fairly early on, he referred to other possible futures where OrigJason and his wife had died in a car wreck. So why didn't THOSE excursions in the multiverse generate alternate Jason2's coming in to steal OrigJason's life? Ugh. So hard to do alternate worlds and time travel without employing handwavium or the old pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain ploy.

There are interesting ideas here, about how our choices make us who we are, and why one iteration of us may not be quite like another. But it's a tricksy topic. 

I guess here is where I confess that the Baxter/Pratchett collaboration "The Long Earth" was more fun to read. That series had an infinte number of earths, but all but one (Datum Earth) was unpopulated by humans. It's not a great series, but it's fun, and there's a bit more sensawunda there than in this volume.

Emelie

Second Read 17-20/2-20: STILL. BEST. BOOK. EVER!!! I would like to raise to rating to 7 owls. I don't think a book have ever given me this much stress and anxiety before! This book is so creepy and fascinating. I'm so mindfucked! Who am I? Am I even real? Where are the other versions of me and how are they living my life? So many questions!! 

First Read 11-14/2-18: This one deserves 6 owls! BEST. BOOK. EVER!!! 

Blake Crouch is a genius, just saying!

Hellboy TCR

Three stars. It has a very interesting premise and a speedy narration, but otherwise is soapy and the ending is all cringe-worthy melodrama, like in Indian tele serials - I bought "Recursion" in print and tried this on Storytel, now I am worried about the other one too.

towards the end the suspense felt like it was tied off unsatisfyingly for me BUT OVERALL. holy shit. i was hooked since the beginning and i loved every character (except the antagonist but u get it) involved in this story. the raw desperation. the magnetic pull of family & the people you love. staying with your principles. the meld between neuroscience & physics in making the [SPOILER] actually work was cool too & i felt #represented. the ache jason[] felt i also felt it in my bones, a longing for home.... yeah. a home, a warmth so like my own, but not like it. a better world. but i won't do it like what >he< did. i know it's not mine to occupy.

Neil Murray

(4.5 stars) I found this really hard to put down..... 

Fast-paced, thought-provoking and fun!

Ewan

Took a while to get going, probably as I had read Recursion the day before and saw a lot of similarities. But just like with that one this book took on a line of its own and took me with it

Dark Matter

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