Dark Matter review

Read this before someone ruins it for you. I’m not being dramatic.

I finished at 1am and then lay awake, my brain refusing to shut off. This is the kind of book that erases your to-do list. Real life becomes background noise. The only thing that matters is finding out what happens next.

It made me feel small. Overwhelmed. A little afraid. I kept reading anyway.

The book pulls off something difficult: it balances suspense, action, science fiction, and romance without any element undermining the others. I felt Jason’s horror. I understood his desperation to return to the people he loves.

And the further I read, the more the scope of the thing revealed itself. It works on you twice, once through the gut and once through the head.

But the part that lingered isn’t the plot machinery. The book poses a question that’s hard to shake: what makes you who you are? If countless versions of yourself exist, each shaped by roads taken and not taken, where does identity actually live? And if every choice splits into a new timeline, why does any single decision matter at all?

The answer the book offers isn’t despair. It’s the opposite. Meaning comes from the act of choosing, from committing to one path and accepting that it’s yours. You’re not defined by what you achieved or what you could have been. You’re defined by what you decided to show up for. Life, in the end, is the one you chose. Not the ones you didn’t.

Most of this book I can’t compare to anything else I’ve encountered. It’s genuinely original, which is rare. It shifted something in how I think, and that doesn’t happen often.

Maybe it won’t land for you. But somewhere out there, another version of you might find it exactly what they needed. Give that person a chance.

Dark Matter

Blake Crouch

Crown Publishing Group, 2016

5/5