Dark Matter
2016
- kidnapping
- fiction
- reality
- science fiction
- psychological
- technological
- suspense
- thrillers
- mystery
The story
One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something impossible. Is it this world or the other that's the dream? How can he possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could have imagined--one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe. --
What it’s like
Taut, cinematic prose that moves like a thriller and keeps returning to the quiet kitchens, bike rides and fluorescent lab corridors of an ordinary Chicago life, so the dread arrives through small disorientations: a familiar street that feels slightly wrong, a spouse who is almost right. The voice is first-person and conversational, plainspoken, with short chapters and cliffhanger breaks that make it easy to read in one sitting. Sensory detail is precise and grounded (cold wind off the lake, the hum of a laboratory, the weight of a gun), while the speculative material is explained in clean, confident strokes rather than dense jargon. Mood is cool and anxious, shading into bleak at points, with a wary, relentless suspense that grows as the protagonist loses his footing. Violence is present and sometimes sudden, including a kidnapping at gunpoint, a drugging and several chase and fight sequences; it is startling and physical but not lingering or gory, and there is little sexual content. Best suited to readers who want a page-turning, late-night or long-flight read with high tension, existential questions about choice and identity, and a domestic heart beneath the sci-fi chase. Not a gentle read.
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