Christopher Febles's Reviews > Dark Matter

The multiverse is all the rage these days. The Midnight Library, Spiderman, and my seventy-four closest clones. You can try to understand the quantum physics and sprain your prefrontal cortex, or you can just assume it all works and climb aboard for the ride. The combination of the two is what makes Blake Crouch perhaps my favorite sci-fi author since Ray Bradbury.

Writing a proper synopsis is beyond my twelfth-grade understanding of math, so let’s start with this: Jason Dessen, middling college physics professor, has a perfect life with his wife Daniela and his son Charlie just outside Chicago. One night, a man in a mask abducts and drugs him. When he comes to, he’s in some advanced lab…and in a new life. In this one, he’s invented some portal to the multiverse, an idea he’d considered but never completed fifteen years ago, when he got married and had a child. He's gripped with a desire to return to them, so he makes his way back through the box he created and across the multiverse to find them.



True to Crouch-ian form, every moment is exciting. OK, when he attempts to explain how the box works…poof. I got nothing. I understand a little, but when I found myself getting foggy, I thought, “Can I just say, ‘it’s a machine that works,’ and enjoy myself?” The answer: absolutely yes.

He uses lots of one-word sentences and real-life dialogue, even with award-winning physicists as characters. There’s the danger of making them one-dimensional, but there’s a realism and approachability here. Everyone has a vulnerability and unique characteristics (ironic, given the book’s material). Even better, the characters get more interesting the deeper Dessen dives into the multiverse. I loved how he sees Daniela and even himself in very different versions of themselves.

That’s the beauty of this work: there’s diving away from gunshots, there’s fighting, and there’s even destruction. But at its heart, the book seems to be about what could’ve been, what it is we want from life, and all the myriad possibilities in all the parallel universes. There’s another danger in getting lost in philosophical reflection or scientific explanations of what this all means, but Crouch again dodges the bullet (yes! Pun! Get it? 'cuz it's a thriller? Hello?). Instead of boring us to tears with what he thinks, he puts Dessen in danger. We get adventure, not ideas. A roller coaster, not a lecture.

I got vibes of the movie The Adjustment Bureau, the book The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Homer Simpson’s journey through time. “I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish.”



It's a phenomenal beach read, a buzzy book you can fly through in no time at all and won’t want to put down. 4.5 stars!