Dark Matter review – quantum fiction that’s delightfully unserious

The first thing to know about Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter is that it is not, by any means, a sensible book. It stars one Jason Dessen, an atomic physicist who has left behind his dreams of creating “the quantum superposition of an object that was visible to the human eye” (more on that later, don’t panic) to settle into life as a professor at a small college, and into domesticity: beautiful artist wife Daniela, teenage son Charlie.

Sent out to buy ice cream one evening, Jason is abducted and drugged, and wakes up to find himself in a version of Chicago that isn’t his own: he’s not married, he has no child, and he now appears to be an award-winning physicist who’s found a way to tap into an infinite number of universes. But who is living his perfect family life while he’s gone? Jason and a pencil-skirted sidekick journey through various nightmarish versions of Chicago as he tries to find his way home, from post-nuclear wasteland to arctic desert, “literally adrift in the nothing space between universes”, looking for “a grain of sand on an infinite beach”.

Dark Matter is madly fast-moving, made even more so by Crouch’s not un-irritating habit of breaking his narrative up into single-line paragraphs. Like so:

“We’re in a simple, finite box again.
Four walls.
A door.
A lantern.
A backpack.
And two bewildered human beings.”

Quite why the door, the lantern and the backpack need so much space on the page is beyond me.

It also, and unashamedly so, appears to be very much aimed at film adaptation. Some scenes go so far as to read like stage setting and direction: “The lighting is soft and unthreatening, like a movie theatre moments before the film begins. There are two straight-backed wooden chairs, and on the small table a laptop, a pitcher of water, two drinking glasses, a steel carafe, and a steaming mug that fills the room with the aroma of good coffee. The walls and ceiling are made of smoked glass.” Et cetera. And indeed Crouch, known for the million-plus selling Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted by Fox, has already seen film rights optioned by Sony Pictures for Dark Matter, for $1.25m.

His particular vision of the multiverse is posited on the Schrödinger’s cat experiment – “you figured out a way to turn a human being into a living and dead cat”, Jason is told at one point. Here, the choices we make splinter off into new worlds all the time. But allow for this, and for the appearance of a “mysterious psychoactive compound”, which is both crucial and running out at an alarming rate, and there’s more to this techno-thriller than meets the eye. Jason’s love for his wife and son is given proper depth and history; it’s touching, and charming. Crouch’s exploration of the path-not-taken fantasy is intriguing, his plot tight.

So Dark Matter is not sensible, but sensible is overrated. It is proud and joyful in its absurdity, and having a lot of fun with it too. It also might be the most helter-skelter, race-to-the-finish-line thriller you’ll read all year, with such a clever, mind-boggling final twist that Sony’s adaptation could just be worth it.

Dark Matter is published by Macmillan (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.65