Dark Matter (Blake Crouch)

Dark Matter
Blake Crouch
Ballantine Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Like most anyone, Jason Dessen has regrets in his life. He could've been an award-winning researcher; his theories on quantum physics might have changed the world. His wife Daniela could've owned the Chicago art scene. But he wouldn't trade his wife or their teen son, Charlie, for anything in the world - even if he sometimes takes them for granted.
Then, one night, on the way home from the corner bar, a stranger accosts him. The masked man steals his phone. He takes his clothes, even. Then he sticks a needle in Jason's arm, and everything goes black.
He wakes up in a strange concrete room, like a hangar, surrounded by people he doesn't know who all act like he's their best friend and their personal hero. According to them, he's the scientist who created a breakthrough: an isolated room and a drug mixture that allow a person access to the quantum multiverse, where every possible chance and choice play out in parallel and equally real realities. In this world, he never married, never had a son, never settled for teaching physics to bored students in a middling college instead of pursuing his own research to dizzying heights of academia.
The Jason of this new world stole his life and family. The original Jason will stop at nothing to get them back, even if he has to search every possible world...

REVIEW: The concept of the multiverse is always a brain-bender, and here it makes a great setting for a thrilling, harrowing journey, one that makes one man question not only his sanity but his very concept of identity. He thinks of himself as the "real" Jason, but how is he any more or less real than the countless other Jasons that exist? How is his world in any way superior? Driven by the love of his wife - a love that happens in more than one world, but which is somehow never quite the same, as nobody is quite the same (when they exist at all; some of the Chicagos he visits are devastated nightmares) - Jason struggles first to escape the life of "Jason 2", as he comes to call the version of himself that thrust him into this unwanted journey, then to find his way back through the infinite possible worlds to the right Daniela, the right Charlie, the right Chicago. The story has plenty of action and tension that keeps ratcheting up, with odds overwhelmingly against him... and, even if he does make it back "home," his troubles may be far from over. There are a few elements that I thought could've used more closure, and Jason's family can sometimes feel less like autonomous people and more as possessions for him to claim and defend, but on the whole Dark Matter is both an interesting and exciting story told across multiple worlds.

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