Dark Matter
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. --
Where Dark Matter keeps showing up
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What you might want to know about Dark Matter
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Walking home from a friend's celebration, Chicago physics professor Jason Dessen is abducted by a masked man and wakes in a life that is almost his. The novel is his fight to find his way back to the family he had.
Yes. Apple TV+ released a nine-episode adaptation of Dark Matter in 2024, with Blake Crouch as showrunner. The show is largely faithful and stars Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly.
No. Dark Matter is a standalone. Blake Crouch has written several other standalone tech-thrillers, including Recursion and Upgrade, with similar themes of identity and reality.
Dark Matter was written by Blake Crouch, published in 2016 by Random House Publishing Group.
Dark Matter is 360 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Dark Matter takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Dark Matter is a standalone novel by Blake Crouch, not part of a series.
Dark Matter is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
