Dark Matter
About
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! • NOW STREAMING ON APPLE TV+
A “mind-blowing” (Entertainment Weekly) speculative thriller about an ordinary man who awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew—from the author of Upgrade, Recursion, and the Wayward Pines trilogy
“Are you happy with your life?”
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious.
Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.
Before a man he’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 professor but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
Is it this life or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how will Jason make it back to the family he loves?
From the bestselling author Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is a mind-bending thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.
Unchaptered
p. 1
No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.
p. 3
I know there are fathers who see the world a certain way, with clarity and confidence, who know just what to say to their sons and daughters. But I’m not one of them. The older I get, the less I understand.
p. 5
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
p. 67
“It’s like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are. But tonight, right now, I see you again, like the first time we met, when the sound of your voice and your smell was this new country.”
p. 151
“‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.‘“
p. 214
“Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn’t make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat.”
It’s the beautiful thing about youth.
…if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.
Highlights
It’s the beautiful thing about youth.
There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
I love my life, but I haven’t felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.
…if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.
The key is to start small. Focus on solving problems you can answer. Build some dry ground to stand on.