Dark Matter Plot Summary

Jason Dessen is on his way back from meeting a friend, when a masked stranger abducts him. Knocked unconscious, he wakes up to find himself surrounded by people he doesn’t know. But they seem to know him. Things only get weirder, as Jason discovers that the life he’s woken up to is nothing like the one he knows. He isn’t a college professor. His home looks completely different. His wife is not his wife.

In trying to discover which is his real life, and what has happened to him, Jason will find himself on a journey beyond his wildest imagination.

My Thoughts

Dark Matter is a mind-bending sci-fi thriller by Blake Crouch. Intelligently written, full of suspense and posing some fascinating questions. This story is a wild ride, start to finish!

For a book with a similar genre overlap, check out my review of Vox!

The book opens on an evening at home. Jason is spending some quality time with his wife, Daniela, and son Charlie. We only get a little time with them before Jason heads out to celebrate a friend’s academic achievement. In that time though, Crouch manages to create a picture of family life that Jason will go to great lengths to get back to. I was definitely impressed by how he managed to make those relationships sufficiently compelling, without being unrealistically perfect. Jason’s relationship with his wife is sweet, but not uncomplicatedly so. In a few short pages, you get a sense of two intelligent people who’ve made difficult sacrifices in their life, but have found real joy in spite of it.

The supporting characters in general don’t have a lot of time to shine. That’s mostly fine, they’re sufficiently well sketched in the time we have that you’re not at risk of mixing anybody up. But I do think some of them were short-changed a little on page time. And if not page time, development. There’s a character who becomes a lot more important to the story about halfway through, but, as much time as we spent with them, I never felt like we got a sense of their motivation. The main focus of Dark Matter is the mystery, and I don’t begrudge it that. It just would have been nice to have a fuller picture of some of the not-Jason characters.

The multiple questions that Jason struggles with (Could he have imagined his entire life? Is he having a psychotic break? Has somebody played the single most elaborate prank in history?) are given plenty of time to play out, despite the story being consistently fast-moving.

All the twisty fun of a time-travel novel, without the inherent plot holes plaguing that genre. The pace is pretty unrelenting, and the atmosphere nail-bitingly tense. I read the whole thing in basically a single day—almost a single sitting! Once you get started, Dark Matter is a book you’ll struggle to put down. I’d definitely recommend it to anybody who likes thrillers, and appreciates seeing a fresh take on the genre. You can find it on Amazon (UK) in digital or physical form, or as an audiobook.