Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (2016)
Unpredictable
Book cover blurb
'ARE YOU HAPPY IN 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 the man he's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back.'
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.
My Review
What a ride!
A fast-paced, thought-provoking nail-biter of a book. Everything flows along at an exquisitely brutal pace. But I love that, just when things are slowing down and letting the reader relax and catch their breath, Crouch slaps you right across the face with a shock injection and off we go again.
I did have trouble with the writing style, it is quite choppy and abrupt, there is very little time spent savouring the small details. You can see the author's background in screenwriting coming through in his prose. Not that this is a bad thing, it's just a style preference on my part, and it certainly does add to the speed of the storytelling.
This book is by no means predictable, but when questions were answered or reveals unveiled I found myself thinking 'Oh yeah, I thought so.' Until the last quarter of the book that is. Without wanting to give anything away, Jason, our main character, can see the finish line right there in front of him and at this point, I was starting to think, 'Things are going to slow down now, it's pretty obvious how the rest of the story will unfold.' But that's when Crouch kicks you in the crotch and screams "WRONG!" right in your face as he throws the biggest spanner in the works I just never saw coming. There was a small foreshadowing previously, but no, I just didn't see this coming at all. And for the rest of the book, to the very last pages, my thought patterns were in a continuous loop of..."How the hell can this end?"
All in all, I loved reading this book, it's an absolute delight. And I will definitely be reading more from Blake Crouch.
Will there be a follow-up to Dark Matter? If there is, you can form an orderly queue behind me.
My copy of this novel
Macmillan hardback edition.
Published in 2016
342 pages
ISBN 9781447297567