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Dark Matter Hardcover – August 11, 2016

by Blake Crouch (Author)

4.4 69,046 ratings

Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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Dark Matter
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A mindbending, relentlessly surprising thriller from the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy.

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

"Are you happy with 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 a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."

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.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.

Print length

342 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Macmillan
Publication date

August 11, 2016
Dimensions

6.02 x 1.14 x 9.21 inches
ISBN-10

1447297563
ISBN-13

978-1447297567
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Popular Highlights in this book

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If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?
Highlighted by 4,439 Kindle readers
Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.
Highlighted by 4,375 Kindle readers
F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Macmillan; Main Market Ed. edition (August 11, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 342 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1447297563
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1447297567
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.02 x 1.14 x 9.21 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,729,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,094 in Time Travel Romances
- #12,332 in Alternate History Science Fiction (Books)
- #41,023 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 69,046 ratings

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About the author

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Blake Crouch

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Blake Crouch is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His novels include the New York Times bestseller Dark Matter, and the internationally bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted into a television series for FOX. Crouch also created the TNT show Good Behavior, based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. His latest book is Recursion, a sci-fi thriller about memory, and will be published in June 2019. He lives in Colorado.

To learn more about what he is doing, check out his website, www.blakecrouch.com, follow him on Twitter - @blakecrouch1 - or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/blakecrouchauthor

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Beth Deese

Sheesh! What a mind melting journey!

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2024

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This book was one wild ride and I loved it! Have you ever wondered about the road not taken in your own life? About the possibilities had you made any other choice but the ones you did, who you would be, what your relationships would be like, what you might have accomplished? Maybe there are multiple versions of us out there now, who made those choices, who are living alternate realities from our own.

It’s all a little much and Crouch’s journey into the multiverse is all a little too much as well but in the best way. It’s a suspenseful thriller that meets sci fi and the result is electric!

Jason Dessen is a physicist past his prime, now teaching college classes and enjoying his life with his wife and 15 year old son. His life is happy, mostly. But he has questions that nag in a small corner of his mind, the what ifs in life. One evening, life takes a very sharp turn left and he faces a high stakes life or death puzzle of how to get back on the path he needs to be on.

The story is a fast paced heart pounder. I was a little nervous when some of the scientific terminology started coming out but Crouch does a very good job of explaining some key theories like quantum physics, parallel universes and Schrodinger’s cat. I feel a little smarter! But also, a little mentally numb trying to keep up with this insane story.

Have fun digging in! You’ll enjoy it!

2 people found this helpful

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GreasyLittleDog

Good read

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2024

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It was interesting and held my attention. Just enough heart vs. sci fi. A tad unbelievable but really only a tad (after all it is sci fi).

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Poppro

Great Characters, Great Story, Fast Paced, Highly Suspenseful!

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2023

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I loved every minute of the story. A little science fiction, a little suspense/mystery, a little adventure--All the things I love to read.

Summary: Brilliant Physicist, Jason, and talented artist, Daniela, decide to hang up their promising careers to raise a family. Jason takes a job as a professor at a local university, and Daniela gives birth to their son, Charlie, and stays home to raise him.
But what might their lives have been like if they decided not to have a family? What if Charlie had never been born? What if Jason continued his advanced research and Daniela pursued her art career? What if they could see the infinite possibilities of each decision?
This book explores these possibilities and the consequences of wielding the power to move between parallel timelines resulting from alternate decisions. Interestingly, the story is not about time travel. The characters don't have the ability to move forward or backward in time. They can, however, jump between parallel branches of the timeline resulting from alternate decisions.
Sound complicated? The author has cleverly developed a story that make it all seem plausible.

My Take: Love the story. Love the characters. Fast paced, highly suspenseful adventure. I could not put the book down. I have only one disappointment; the ending seemed a bit predictable and anti-climactic. Once the reader understands how it all worksand the conflicts have been dealt with, the final scene simply wraps it all up--no real surprises at the very end. I was somehow expecting a big revelation that would leave the reader with a lot to wonder about.

I highly recommend this book to sci-fi/ mystery/adventure readers. Even for those who are not Sci-fi fans.

5 people found this helpful

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Michael Huggins

Definitely an airport or beach novel, though somewhat thought-provoking

Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2016

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I bought this book, after reading a very positive review in a magazine, on the mistaken assumption that it would be a William Gibson novel--that is, a book that used an intense exploration of scientific facts to create a haunting reality that gets deep into your head and leaves you not quite sure just what you've encountered. Instead, I felt as though I were reading a rehash of a great many other things, books and film, that I've read or seen, including Sheldon J. Pacotti's novel "The Demiurge," Sam Shepherd's play "True West," the TV series "Awake," with Jason Isaacs, and the movies "Julia and Julia," "Total Recall," "Regarding Henry," "Somewhere in Time," "The Thirteenth Floor," "Primer," and "The Age of Adaline," as well as other TV programs and movies whose titles I have simply forgotten.

The book is, to be sure, a page-turner, and I read it through in a single afternoon, all 300+ pages, while stranded at an airport waiting for my canceled flight to finally be scheduled for takeoff. It kept me fully absorbed, and the last few chapters were quite suspenseful. But in the end, it was the intellectual equivalent of a meal at MacDonald's.

The premise of the book is that the "multiverse" theory of some physicists is actually true, and that someone might find a path from one such universe to another and possibly wreak havoc.

The "multiverse" is an idea based on quantum physics. According to this theory, whenever we make a choice, an entire different universe "splits off" from the one we know, and in that universe, we made the other choice. Thus, according to this theory, there is a universe in which Hitler was admitted to art school and never sought political power, so the Third Reich never happened.

Now imagine that a physicist had invented an advanced machine, and the Hitler we know of began to wonder what his life might have been like as an illustrator of popular magazines, and he found a way into that alternate universe. Meanwhile, the obscure artist version of Hitler found himself yanked into the universe we know, with the Nazi hierarchy addressing him as Fuhrer and asking to know what his plans were for world conquest.

I cite the above only as an illustration. The book has nothing to do with Hitler. It concerns an obscure American physics professor teaching at a local college near Chicago, married to a woman with artistic talent, and with a teenage son. Fifteen years earlier, the professor was on his way to making path-breaking discoveries in science and being in the running for international prizes, and his wife might have been a very famous artist. Instead, she became pregnant, they decided to keep the baby and stay together, and now, they live lives of near-contentment, loving each other and their son, to be sure, but occasionally still wondering what might have been.

One night, after leaving a celebration at a bar for a pal who actually did win international prizes and renown, the humble professor finds himself kidnapped at gunpoint by a man in a mask, who takes him to an abandoned industrial plant, forces him to strip, and injects him with a drug. When the professor awakes, he finds himself in a parallel world where serious and ruthless men treat him as a celebrity and are waiting to know what he will do next in the service of the large and powerful organization that in this world, he helped found.

In this world, he even meets his parallel wife, now a famous artist, though she remembers him only as a boyfriend who broke up with her 15 years before. Determined to get back to the world he knows, he sets out into nightmarish adventures via a trans-dimensional machine that he invented as his "successful" self, emerging into various alternate Chicagos, some of them horrifying, while others are passable but never quite right.

Will he ever make it back?

And if, as the theory holds, our choices bring other universes into existence, could he also have birthed alternate selves, even in the course of his quest, all of whom have the same idea of reclaiming the life he once knew?

As Arnold Schwarzenegger's character says in "Total Recall," "If I'm not me, den who da h___ am I?

By the way, I could be wrong, but I believe the book is mistitled. Dark Matter is a known and demonstrable property of the universe that is the only way to account for the universe's weight and shape, as well as certain gravitational phenomena. It is no longer considered speculative and, as far, as I know, the "multiverse" theory is not based on it. The idea of a multiverse is, indeed, a logical extrapolation from certain demonstrated principles of quantum physics, and some scientists find it quite plausible, but it is not, as far as I know, based on dark matter, nor is it considered a settled question, as dark matter is. I could be wrong. In any case, "Dark Matter" is a more intriguing title than "The Multiverse."

16 people found this helpful

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MOHAMED AYUB SAMIDON

Great book!

Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2024

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This was an amazing book. It was written very well and a great easy read. The concepts were immensely interesting. I don’t usually read thrillers or sci-fi books, but this was mind-blowing! A bit too much romance focused for my liking. Would have liked more family dynamic and importance. But still, interesting plot. This book is fast paced and will keep hold of your attention. The ending was solid, but I don’t like cliffhangers.
All in all, good book, would definitely recommend!

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2023

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I have always enjoyed this author’s writing and will be looking forward in the future for more of his books!

One person found this helpful

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SeasonedBuyer

exciting, exhilarating, thought-provoking

Reviewed in Canada on December 31, 2023

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I devoured this book. I’m grateful I started reading on a Friday. I couldn’t stop. This book was phenomenal. Go into it blind. Enjoy the ride.

One person found this helpful

Cliente Kindle

Emocionante

Reviewed in Brazil on July 31, 2023

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Livro cheio de emoções e questionamentos.
Algumas vezes previsível, mas sempre com um algo a mais que não tinha como imaginar!!
Uma história que prende do começo ao fim
Recomendo aos que amam ficção científica, ação e aos que buscam uma história única sobre um amor que ultrapassa dimensões

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Mauricio Sanchez

Excelente libro

Reviewed in Mexico on June 1, 2021

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La historia es excelente, el libro de portada dura es precioso y perfecto para poner en el librero.

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Nigel

Good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2024

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Speedy delivery

Shreyansh Mishra

Mind-blowing

Reviewed in India on December 28, 2023

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Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
1st thing about this book is i got asked in an interview about my hobby and i said reading and literally when asked further I suggested this masterpiece to my interviewer.
Now let's move on to the review
The author sets a tone and pace in the first few pages and after that the story just takes charge.
The protagonist's character Jason is written beautifully, the ups and downs in the story and his decisions in this adranaline ride would make you change the way you're sitting and not once but many times. The author is will take you in this mind-blowing journey and will definitely make you realise in the concept of parallel universe. I am a huge fan of sci fi movies and after reading this i am waiting for someone to make it into a film i would really like to go through the same rush again but this time using visuals. One last thing the character Jason and his journey in Dark Matter is really going to make you realise that however your life is right now it is the most precious thing.
That's it
The end
Really looking forward to read Recursion from the same author.

One person found this helpful

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Dark Matter Hardcover – August 11, 2016

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