Sci-fi Hallmark Movie? Black Matter by Blake Crouch

clsimpson430
Jun 2, 2023
3 min read

My Rating: 3 Stars

Let me start off by saying that I LOVED Wayward Pines so I had high expectations for Dark Matter.

But this book did not live up to its full potential. Dark Matter introduces this AMAING mind-bending sci-fi concept...but then it ditches it for a typical romantic goose chase and sadly becomes predictable.

The plot can either be seen as a sci-fi thriller or an over the top drama:

Discontent college professor and family man Jason is abducted and drugged one night. When he wakes up, he is no longer a teacher, father, or husband. Instead, he's in a world where he has reached his full professional potential as a scientist. But he soon discovers that his personal life is lacking, resulting in him going through trial after trial trying to get back to his wife and son and what he hopes is his reality.

The beginning will have you HOOKED. You're introduced to this whole storyline about the time space continuum and alternate realities...but Crouch sadly drops the ball after this. Instead, he chooses to follow the more existentialist route with the whole "Am I truly happy? What if I had made this choice?" type of thing. I mean yeah, valid questions, but that's what we have Hallmark movies for. We all know how that storyline ends.

So what Crouch should have done was focused on his sci-fi elements. But the sci-fi elements are never fully explained. I'm still left with questions about how the big scientific invention worked and how it panned out for the future. I mean it quite literally opened up Pandora's box of alternate realities and never even closed it. The focus of the book drastically switches from the sci-fi storyline to the dramatic storyline and never gives a solid conclusion for the first.

But...I can't say it was a bad book. I did read it in 2 days. It's action packed and fast paced. But again, if you replaced the sci-fi elements with magical pixie dust...it's totally a Hallmark movie. A decent one made in the 90s with a semi-famous person in it! But still a Hallmark movie.

In conclusion: This book is the equivalent of a 90 minute action movie...or a super complex sci-fi Hallmark movie. It's interesting and fun to read, just a little predictable.

Synopsis:

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.