Literacy 2025: Book 15: Dark Matter

Book
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Synopsis
Jason Dessen is a quantum physicist living in Chicago, teaching at a university, and happily married with a teenage son. A contentious encounter with an old friend and roommate leaves Jason wondering about how his life would’ve gone differently had he pursued his research instead of settling down with a family. That night, he’s kidnapped by a stranger, injected with a disorienting drug, and left for dead inside an abandoned warehouse. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a familiar but alien version of his own world, where he’d not only continued his research into quantum entanglement, but taken it to an extreme that he never would’ve thought possible.

Notes
Usually, I can appreciate an author’s talent at making a book propulsive and engaging, even if I’m not entirely won over by its depth. Getting the pacing right for a thriller is really difficult, and it should be respected! And I’m also warming up to the idea of authors taking big swings stylistically, choosing to forgo straightforward, naturalistic writing in favor of making the prose itself interesting. But Dark Matter didn’t entirely work for me.

A big part of it is the writing style, and since I haven’t read anything else by Crouch, I still don’t know whether it’s his style, or if it’s a specific affectation he uses in this book. But there’s a drastically overused tendency to write in sentence fragments.

A few words.

A period.

An adjective.

Another adjective.

And so on.

Separated by lengthy, exposition-heavy dialogue in which characters that all have mostly the same voice will give a layman’s explanation of quantum theory or the layout of Chicago. It is undeniably good for pacing, and I often found myself barreling through it, but it also never stops being distracting.

I can’t really fault the book for its content feeling overfamiliar, since it was written during the initial wave of similar projects, and I’m only reading it now after the ideas have been overused in popular culture.

Multiverses.

Alternate realities.

Sliding Doors.

Everything.

Everywhere.

All at Once.

I feel like I can fault it for taking too long to get to the point, however. The first two thirds of the book are going to feel familiar to anyone who’s ever read or seen a story about multiverses, and it seems to treat the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment as if it were still an idea unexplored in popular fiction.

But the last third has a twist/plot development that I genuinely hadn’t seen coming, and it’s by far the most interesting idea in the book. Unsettling in its implications, took the story in a whole new direction, turned the story from suspense thriller into horror, since I had no idea how the protagonist could possibly get out of the situation.

And that ties into my other main criticism of the book, which is that it’s so completely solipsistic, something it mentions in passing but still doesn’t seem to be aware of how off-putting it is. The protagonist is the most important character in the multiverse, and everyone else is an afterthought. I noticed this the most in its handling of its two women characters, who are both described with respect, but are put into roles where they have no real agency apart from supporting or driving the main character. One of them even mentions that she’s being treated as a prize to be won, which doesn’t patch over the problem but merely draws attention to it.

But in its defense, she (Daniela, Jason’s wife) is also the character who explains why their solution for the book’s unsolvable final conflict is a satisfying one, calling out the very specific choices that do make us unique in an infinite multiverse. I was just disappointed that so much of the book is about her, without actually giving her a more significant role to play.

Verdict
I wouldn’t be as critical of a book that I didn’t enjoy reading at all, and Dark Matter is compelling and engaging, with the last third exploring an idea that I hadn’t expected and I hadn’t seen before. If you read it as an entertaining suspense thriller, the kind designed to hit the New York Times bestseller list and written with the movie rights already in mind, it’s solid. But (at the risk of being too corny) if you look at it too closely, it all starts to collapse.