Blake Crouch’s novel Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch, is a science fiction, mind-bending, multiverse thriller. The story begins with the main character, Jason, at a family dinner with his wife Daniela and their son Charlie. At the beginning of chapter one, Jason tells us, “I love Thursday nights. They have a feel to them that’s outside of time. It’s our tradition, just the three of us-family night.” Everything soon changes.
The premise is that some other version of the multiverse exists. (a multiverse is a hypothetical group of multiple universes) In one of these other places, a Jason2 has built a way to cross over to where Jason 1 lives. Then Jason1 trying to investigate becomes lost in another universe, and experiences take him to many alternate realities where his main goal is to get home to his wife and son.
The story is a unique answer to the question: If you had a chance to go back and change a decision in your life, would you do it?
A critical time in the plot happened years before the story started when Jason Desson’s girlfriend Daniela learned she was pregnant. Jason gives up his very successful studies on superposition, becoming a teacher and devoted family man. Daniela gives up her successful life as an artist, and they focus their lives on the family.
The plot takes us to the day when Jason is forced to face what that life might have been like when he is kidnapped by a strange man who asks if he is happy with his life.
This book was one I didn’t want to put down. What was a complicated story became even more complicated by the end. I enjoyed the book.
Quotes
“No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.”
“It's terrifying to consider that every thought we have, every choice we could make, branches off into a new world.”
“Imagine you’re a fish swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see, what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.”
