Jason Dessen is a physics professor at a low-level university, living in Chicago with his art teacher wife Daniela and their teenage son Charlie. Jason and Daniela had high hopes for their careers once upon a time, but an unplanned pregnancy knocked them a bit off course. Now, they have a happy home life that is just a bit tinged with regret for what might have been. One night Jason reluctantly heads out to a bar to congratulate an old friend for winning a prestigious scientific prize, the kind that Jason himself used to hope he would win someday. On his way back home he is accosted and eventually kidnapped by a masked man who takes him to a deserted location and asks him all sorts of personal questions before knocking him out.
When Jason wakes up (spoilers from this point forward) he finds out what happened. A parallel universe version of himself has decided to switch places. In his new reality, Jason Dessen chose career over family and made major scientific breakthroughs. He somehow worked out how to travel between parallel realities. But he regretted leaving Daniela and their potential child behind, so he used his invention to see how his life would have worked out if he’d made the other choice.
Now original Jason has to figure out a way to get by as his alter ego long enough to figure out a way back home to his wife and son. And he has to figure out how to explain what has happened to them when he does.
As you can tell from the image above, Dark Matter has been adapted into a TV series for Apple TV, and therein lies the problem. Reading the novel, I got the distinct impression that Crouch was less interested in writing a complex, crafted novel for readers to enjoy and more interested in cranking out a draft he could use to pitch the idea to television executives. Details are hard to come by in Crouch’s world. Jason (original flavor) has no personality beyond “good at science, loves his wife and kid.” Daniela’s whole personality is just “art.” Why she got into art, what kind of art she loves, or what she thinks about anything else in the world are topics that Crouch feels no need to address. And Charlie is just “kid.”
The story also leaves a lot to be desired, mostly because the whole book seems to be written with eyeball-attracting action set-pieces in mind. I haven’t watched the show and may not ever, but I bet they have a few real doozys. The problem is with the decided lack of attention on world-building. The other Jason runs a company devoted to fulfilling his ideas. What are those ideas? How do they work out in the real world? Is the company, and by extension, New Jason, evil? Think about that on your time, will ya? Blake Crouch has a great idea for an episode six plot twist.
I flew through Dark Matter not because I was entertained or excited. It’s just a weightless novel with, for the most part, fifth-grade-level sentence structure. But hey, maybe it really pops on TV.