“Dark Matter,” by Blake CrouchReview by Kevin JohnsonIn our era where so many are driven to decisions with sights set on immediate gratification, debating on whether to place focus and value in pursuit of professional success or personal relationships, we swim amidst a sea of what ifs. What if we’d made a different turn in the road, having taken hold of an alternative opportunity? How would our lives be affected? And how would each individual, subtly or not so subtly, turn out different?
Jason Dessen has built a stable household with his college sweetheart teaching science at a college and running a small bar while raising their young son. This may not be the life either he or his wife would have envisioned when they first got together, but life happens and plans change. The question is, how would life have been if other choices had been made?
What if every fork in the road and every choice were not what we perceive as one chosen path continuing? What if paths not chosen didn’t just become dead ends in our past of possibilities. Perhaps all of the disregarded paths continue on as a network of branching parallel lives, parallel lives that might not be as separate as we theorize.
In “Dark Matter” Blake Crouch abducts the reader’s attention from the quaint domesticity of this Chicago family man’s run-of-the-mill evening, thrusting imagination upon a trail of narrative winding through a quantum labyrinth of emotional upheaval and second guessing, “what if.”
Kevin Johnson is a Senior Bookseller at Maria’s Bookshop.
