Review: Dark Matter

Dark Matter is Blake Crouch's novel about a man who's kidnapped by a mirror world substitute. Rather than a serious or speculative novel, it's structured as a thriller, and doesn't spend much time actually discussing quantum mechanics, despite the author's proclamations.

The protagonist, Jason Dessen, is kidnapped and drugged one day, and wakes up in a world where he's a famous scientist, and he was never married and had no kids. He discovers that his alternate world counterpart has invented a machine that can traverse the multiverse, and he escapes to find his family.

Crouch is a screenwriter, so the novel reads a lot like a movie would, with lots of action, dialog that performs exposition instead of stream-of-consciousness descriptions, and obvious places where the camera cuts from scene to scene. The writing is fast paced and smooth, and zero thinking is required on the part of the reader as everything is spoon-fed to you.

This makes Dark Matter a reasonable airplane novel, and can be recommended as such. If you want deeper stuff go elsewhere.