Dark Matter - Where Recommendations Go to Die
Blake Crouch | Grade: B | Expectation: A+ | Participation Award: Negative
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Dark Matter
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Every once in a while, okay, that's a lie, all too often, I find myself perplexed. Sometimes I'm perplexed by how anyone could vote for Orange Man Pedophile McGee. Sometimes I'm perplexed by the staggering levels of incompetence in my world. Once in a while I'm perplexed by the meaning of life (42), or astrophysics, or why the universe apparently needs to be so damn complicated.
But most of the time, the perplexity is much simpler.
Why are bras no longer in vogue? What the hell is this language young people are speaking? And, most importantly for the purposes of this blog, why the hell does everyone love a book that I apparently just don't get?
I'm not going to sit here all high and mighty and pretend I'm better than everyone. Better than most, sure. Better than everyone? Let's not get carried away.
In particular, I'm talking about the eclectic group of people who recommended this book or otherwise metaphorically orgasmed over how great it is. Some of my dearest friends, not just the English Major, who, let's all be honest, has pretty shitty taste in literature, but also friends who aren't English Majors. Just plain people. People from all walks of life. People who presumably have functioning brains.
When I told every bookphile I know that I was reading Dark Matter, they gushed. Some came dangerously close to tears. Some openly admitted they were jealous that I was experiencing the book for the first time. One would think I had announced that I was about to discover the cure for cancer rather than read a moderately sized science-fiction novel.
I don't get it.
Again, I'm a hard man to please. The fact that my wife has managed to do so for 20+ years is nothing less than proof of God's existence. But really, this book just wasn't all that special.
The first 50–75 pages left me pretty damn bored, wondering if I was missing something.
I wasn't.
Page by page, thankfully at a blistering pace because apparently the font was sized for toddlers, I kept wondering when this masterpiece everyone had promised me was going to arrive. And eventually, it did – or the bar had already been lowered to the ground so anything beyond crap, passed as Van Gough's greatest art.
For about 250 pages, Dark Matter is pretty damn solid. The storytelling is good, the central concept is interesting, there's a physics nerd at the center of it all, and the multiverse stuff starts getting weird in exactly the way you want a book about the multiverse to get weird.
Okay. Now we're cooking.
The hook is in. All Crouch has to do is tug it.
Or, as Happy Gilmore once famously said, "Tap it in. Tap tap tap it in."
And then, apparently, Crouch decided he had another 75 pages to fill and absolutely no interest in doing it normally.
The final stretch swerves from one increasingly ridiculous plot development to another, eventually turning what had been a pretty fun and interesting story into a muddled mess of nonsense. The book takes the concept, stretches it, twists it, throws it against the wall, picks it back up, and then apparently decides the best possible way to wrap everything up is with a Jesus moment.
A parting of the sea.
Except instead of Moses, we've got a bunch of Jasons.
Yes, that sentence will make sense if you read the book.
No, it does not make the ending better.
And that's really my biggest problem with Dark Matter. It's not bad. In fact, it's pretty good for a significant chunk of its runtime. But when a book comes into my life with a reputation like this one, I'm expecting the literary equivalent of Michael Jordan walking onto the court.
Instead, I got a guy who had a pretty good pickup game and everyone around me started screaming that I had just witnessed the Second Coming.
Grade: B.
And to all of you folks who loved it, I'm happy for you. Truly. I'm glad you're happy with yourself.
For me, I'll continue moping from one day to the next, waiting for another book to come along and tickle my soul.
Patrick Rothfuss, I'm looking your way.
Do better.