Dark Matter – Blake Crouch

I worked esl for years, and I recall how, in one of those esl textbooks schools tend to provide, encountering the term “page-turner” listed as a genre of literature. I was livid. Its an adjective for fiction, but not a genre. Right?

Or at least I think it is.

Dark Matter is a page turner. Its also a science -fiction novel. Over the course of my life I have watched science-fiction go from being something that was much more akin to para-literature to being an accepted part of the main stream. The books I got mocked for reading as a kid in school are now being adapted to the screen by every company who can afford to make an over blown TV show. Science-fiction has entered the mainstream in a pretty big way, and that for me effects the way I read books.

Dark Matter is a story about a man kidnapped by forces unknown only to discover that he has been kicked off into another dimension, a parallel universe, where the path his life took was fundamentally different. That theme could start to be a genre in itself, and while I don’t think this book does it particularly well, I didn’t hate it here. But I don’t think I was blown over by it either, as there was just something kind of wacky about the plot. There was a scene where the protagonist has to walk by a small army of alternate history version of himself, each being a variation of himself just from the beginning of the narrative, and I could not help but imagine as a kind of Rick and Morty episode played straight.

I don’t think that’s the vibe Blake Crouch was going for.

Again, it’s a page turner. I don’t think I was meant to take the science here to literally. There is a whole Schrodinger’s cat explanation to the technology that would likely make the poor misunderstood Schrodinger spin in his grave. I as well found some of the romance to be cringy. I might be slightly emotionally stunted, but I do think some of the sense of wonder the protagonist is experiencing to have been lost by his dogged determination to get home to his sci-fi Penelope. There was something of an Odyssey feel to this story at moments, which did give me a chuckle.

If you are looking at this as science-fiction, I think you can do it better. But it is a page-turner. That’s the quality I’m most going to remember about it. While reading this, I started remembering Sam Delany’s essays about how you can never actually separate content from style. The style (the short sentences, the short paragraphs) is what makes it a page turner, and I while it is not a great style, it fits the book itself.

I didn’t hate this, but it wasn’t the best thing I have ever read. I have ‘Recursion’ at hand, and will read it when I have a bit of reading burn out. I think it will help.