Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

For anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.

Dear Reader—In celebration of the paperback release of Recursion, I decided to annotate the top ten highlighted sections of Dark Matter. Hope you enjoy! Blake

F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

I’ve always had a fondness for the fall. It reminds me of the start of school. Of youth and potential. Growing up in the south, summer seemed endless. Green trees, hot days. To see the leaves begin to turn and the mornings dawn colder and colder gave a sense of life progressing after the stasis of summer. It was important that I capture this in the opening of the book, as Jason Dessen is looking at all the possible roads not taken. The fall season reminds him of what it once felt like to be truly alive, and is an entry-point to the journey that awaits him.

It’s the beautiful thing about youth. There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

When I was writing Dark Matter, I was in a low point in my life. Much like the character of Jason Dessen, I was looking back at all the roads not taken and feeling envious of my younger self. I tried to channel that ennui into my protagonist. This was, hands-down, the most personal thing I had ever written up to this point.

A realization and the terror that follows it—terror of the limitless indifference surrounding us. I don’t know if that’s the intended takeaway from Daniela’s installation, but it’s certainly mine. We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

This scene, where Jason1 visits Daniela2’s art installation was one of my favorite things to write in the book. I loved exploring what Daniela’s life might have been if she’d had a chance to fully commit herself to her art.

Nothing exists. All is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you…. And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. MARK TWAIN

I discovered this quote from Mark Twain during the writing process, and I fell in love with it because it nails a beautiful conundrum of human existence. The only thing we can be sure of is that we are conscious. I thought it was a perfect existential crisis to introduce as Jason1 is wrestling with his own psychosis in Jason2’s brave new world.

“We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.”

For me, this isn’t just a quote from Dark Matter. This is the closest thing to a thematic mission statement you’ll find when it comes to my catalog of books. I want to expose and explore just how mysterious and beautiful our universe is. And how reality is so much weirder than we think.

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe. What if that’s true? What if we live in a fifth-dimensional probability space?

This is the most concise explanation of quantum theory (as it applies to humanity) as you’ll find. When I learned about the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, I knew I had to write about it, and this theory started me down the path of planning the novel that would become Dark Matter.

“When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.”

This was such a pivotal moment for me during the writing of this book. I had gotten my main characters into the multiverse, surfing Jason’s Box, but I had no idea how they might begin to control what types of worlds they visited. It all seemed so random and uncontrollable. I was writing (by hand) in one of my brainstorming journals for the book, trying to figure out how I was ever going to get Jason1 back to his homeworld, when it hit me like a lightning bolt—just have him write—in a journal like I was in that moment—about the kind of world he wants to find and then let his observation create it on the other side of the door. A fun instance of life influencing art.

All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.

I wrote this when I was lost in the weeds of the “lost in the multiverse” section of Dark Matter. In the first part of this section, the worlds are vastly different, but as the pages went on and Jason1 got closer and closer to his homeworld, the deviations between worlds grew smaller and smaller. I started thinking about all the tiny things that make my world mine. I think that’s the true definition of home.

If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?

This is possibly my favorite line of the book. It’s something I think about often. So much of our identity is about cultural and lifestyle overlays. We’re defined by our jobs, partners, where we live, what we believe. But removing all of that, is there something more fundamental that defines the nature of who we are?

I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

I originally had put this line much earlier in the book. I always loved it, but it felt off for some reason. I realized on the third or fourth draft that it wasn’t working, because it was too soon in the story. This needed to be a realization that Jason1 comes to only after he’s lost his family and finds himself cast away in the multiverse.

Dark Matter was the hardest work of my career, and I couldn’t have pushed it across the finish line without the help and support of the constellation of generous, talented, and amazing people who brightened my sky during its writing.

So what is this novel? I like to think of it as a story about the road not taken. It contains elements of thriller, science fiction, paranoid suspense, the slightest touch of horror, but at its core, it’s a love story—about how our hero’s relationship with the woman he loves has changed him and his world, and just how far he will go to be with her. It’s also the manifestation of everyone’s existential question: Am I who I was supposed to be? Is this the life I was meant to be living?

“This book is for anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.”

Time is but memory in the making. —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

If you loved Dark Matter, please check out my newest sci-fi thriller Recursion. It might actually break your brain more than this one… You can check out Recursion on Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42046112-recursion?ref=knhdm