Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is a book that suffers by the recent over-saturation of its subject matter.

That may be an obtuse title, but I don't want to give anything about the plot away for those who haven't read it. By and large, I enjoyed the book. It's a very quick read with very brief and fast-paced sentences. It's a popcorn book that's easy to lose yourself in.

However, I was relatively disappointed by it. I first read Recursion and really enjoyed its unique twist on a classic sci-fi trope. I then read Upgrade, which I enjoyed quite a bit less. Again, it was good, but not amazing. The title explains the concept of the book—the protagonist gets an upgrade that essentially makes him superhuman, which is a plot we've seen before. I'd say the best part of the book was its unique worldbuilding, as it takes place in a believable, somewhat dystopian future.

It's funny, I'd read reviews saying Dark Matter was the best of his books, but it has neither element of the last two books. There's no real twist on it's sci-fi concept, and there's no worldbuilding to speak of as it takes place during our present day.

To stop beating around the bush, Dark Matter involves the many worlds theory and hopping around parallel dimensions. Somewhat like Groundhog Day & Edge of Tomorrow with its repeating the same day over and over again, hopping between parallel worlds that are sometimes just slightly different than our own is a concept that'll always be cool.

But in recent years we've seen a lot of this. Marvel has leaned heavily into the multiverse with their recent movies, as has the Spider-verse films. Everything Everywhere All At Once explored this idea brilliantly.

Dark Matter came out in 2016, before any of those did, and reading it back then might've been a more novel experience. But reading it in 2023, through no real fault of its own, made the book seem much less unique than it otherwise would've been. It doesn't help that it doesn't, like I mentioned, really do anything super unique with the premise. The method by which they travel to parallel worlds is pretty unique, but there's no False Memory Syndrome like you get in Recursion. You just get in a box and hop dimensions and there you are.

I like how it tried to be as scientifically accurate as it could, and reading about the explanations for how everything worked was thought provoking. The worlds they explore were pretty… standard? Like "here's a futuristic one and he's a post-apocolyptic one and here's one where there's a plague spreading around and here's one that's really similar to ours but the restaurants are in different places."

A lot of the book's stakes hinges on how you feel about Jason's desire to be with his family. It worked on me and i was invested, but my book club I read this with wasn't quite the same and I can't blame them, so they didn't get as much out of it. Of the three Blake Crouch books I've read, each of them features a middle-aged white male protagonist who gets taken away from his loving family and his main driving force for the rest of the book is to get back to them. It's gotten a little old by this point.

Dark Matter's ending did catch me off guard, and did provide some thought-provoking ideas about our own individualism and the choices we make. But ultimately there wasn't anything in it to make me go "Holy shit this is amazing". It was just, "This is alright." Recursion got me the closest to that point, and that's why it's my favorite of the three. Upgrade's unique world and exploration into what it would be like to bee upgraded and have those powers makes it my second favorite. Dark Matter just didn't really do it for me.

Also, I wasn't a fan of the writing style. It was a stylistic choice, but it wasn't for me. It kept the pace quick, but I like some description and a mastery of the language, not sentence-long paragraphs that move a mile a minute.