Happy Tuesday Earthlings! I hope everyone had a great long weekend and is ready to take on the week. I had some free time in the past few days so, I was able to catch up on some reading. I picked up a book called Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. It had great reviews and I had recently read Wayward Pines which is a trilogy by Crouch that I enjoyed. Wayward Pines might sound familiar to you guys because Fox Network turned it into a television show. So, naturally after experiencing a great trilogy by Crouch I was all in to read his newest Science Fiction thriller Dark Matter.
Blake is great at painting dark and twisted imagery, whether he is describing a murder or the layered inner workings of String Theory. His words work as vibrant paint for the canvas that is our imagination. Dark Matter started out strong but really didn’t keep me captivated. We are introduced to a scientist named Jason Dessen. Jason chooses to raise a family and let the prime of his career pass him by. While a colleague of his seems to be living the life Jason should have always had. We follow Jason through his eminent abduction, and the last thing he hears before being knocked out is, “Are you happy with your life?”.
We are put on a very fast and winding track inside of the genius mind Jason Dessen laid to waste in leu of having a family. We uncover different realms of human consciousness, get tossed around alternate universes, and trek into dark matter. But, I almost feel like I am describing the book much better than it actually read. One of my favorite things Crouch does is his literary imagery, I mentioned it earlier in regards to his previous trilogy Wayward Pines. However, in Dark Matter there wasn’t such a distinct thumb print on the characters or the story. I feel like Crouch could have dug a little deeper and taken the story to a creepier level. The whole fun in Science Fiction is being able to use technical scientific terminology and I felt like Dark Matter fell short of that. Crouch almost dumbed it down a little to much for us laymen.
If you are a big Science Fiction buff like myself, I would suggest passing on Dark Matter. If you are new into the genre and are more focused on enjoying a thriller filled with twists and turns, than Dark Matter is a great starter novel. I still have plenty of hope and faith in Crouch blowing my mind next time around, but for now he just made it fizzle. Even though Dark Matter didn’t hold up like I expected, Wayward Pines was an excellent trilogy and I definitely would suggest that work by Crouch to anyone!
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