Reviews with content warning for Pregnancy - Dark Matter

Reviews tagging 'Pregnancy'

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

28 reviews

mossy_rock's review against another edition

4.0

dark funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I liked it overall, very fun premise. I didn't expect the ending setup. However, it felt like everything got wrapped up so quickly. There are many loose ends that never get resolved.

Content Warnings

boba_nbooks's review against another edition

4.75

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Spice Rating: 🌶️ / 5

Multiverse x midlife crisis. I would be terrified to see that many versions of myself.

Content Warnings

leannanecdote's review against another edition

2.0

adventurous mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Content Warnings

orionmerlin's review against another edition

3.0

adventurous emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Characters: 5/10

Jason Dessen is what happens when you mix a textbook midlife crisis with a physics degree and give it a gun. He’s the poster child for “white guy protagonist has feelings and consequences ensue.” His entire character arc is built around the idea that he gave up his Nobel dreams for family and now lives in a purgatory of self-pity. And yes, I get that’s the point. Regret and sacrifice and all that. But I don’t need to hear about it every five pages.

Worse, he’s a personality void. The only thing that defines him is what he gave up. His motivations are repetitive, his emotional reactions are flat, and the only growth he undergoes is deciding not to murder himself for convenience. Congratulations, I guess?

Daniela is less a character and more a vessel for Jason’s longing. Her entire existence is filtered through his idealization. When we finally get her perspective? It's too little, too late. Even her “choosing” Jason in the end has nothing to do with her desires—it’s framed as fate. Amanda, the only interesting female character, is dropped like a side quest the author couldn’t be bothered to finish. She deserved better.

AltJasons? Great idea, wasted execution. There’s no effort to individualize them. They’re just a swarm of mustache-twirling variants ready to stab each other for the right to own a woman and child like emotional accessories. Gross.

Atmosphere/Setting: 7.5/10

Here’s where the book almost shines. Crouch is good at tone. The dread, the claustrophobia, the creeping wrongness of being in the wrong reality—it all works. The lab scenes are eerie, the desolate alternate Chicagos are unsettling, and the early abduction sequence is legitimately tense.

But then it stops innovating. Once the multiverse gimmick is introduced, every world is just a slightly tweaked version of the last. Snow. No snow. Chicago, but kind of weird. Chicago, but apocalypse. The Box—the actual vehicle of world-hopping—is described like a spooky hallway with doors and nothing else. Why is it always just a hallway? Why can’t we get even a little speculative creativity in how this device manifests?

The settings serve the story, but they don’t enrich it. They’re background dressing for Jason’s internal monologue, which never shuts up.

Writing Style: 5.5/10

Crouch writes like he’s auditioning for a Netflix pitch meeting. Short sentences. Lots of italics. Cliffhanger paragraphs. No room to breathe. It’s “thriller writing” in the most industrialized, algorithm-approved sense. Every sentence feels optimized for speed, not substance.

Dialogue exists mostly to push the plot forward or give Jason a platform for his man-pain. Internal narration is repetitive to the point of parody. (“Do I love my wife? Do I deserve this life? Who am I really?”—every five pages, like clockwork.)

And the science? Don’t even get me started. The “quantum superposition serum” might as well be magic glitter. The entire premise relies on you believing that intense emotion = GPS coordinates in the multiverse. It’s less science fiction and more “emotionally compromised man punches quantum reality with his feels.”

Plot: 6/10

Cool premise, botched execution. The beginning is genuinely gripping. Jason gets abducted, wakes up in a lab, realizes someone else is living his life. That’s good stuff! But the moment he starts reality-hopping, it turns into a glorified fetch quest for “my perfect reality.”

Every new universe is a reset button. The stakes are temporarily high, but nothing sticks. The whole middle third of the book is just Jason wandering around like a sad Sims character: inject self, open door, despair, repeat. There's a hint of psychological horror when he starts losing track of who he is, but that gets tossed aside in favor of action.

Then comes the ending, which is both over-the-top and underwhelming. Seventy-plus Jasons all converging to kill each other? That should be epic. Instead, it feels ridiculous and emotionally hollow. The resolution—“Let’s just run away to a new timeline!”—is a narrative shrug. It’s the story equivalent of turning off your phone instead of answering the hard text.

Intrigue: 6.5/10

Yes, I kept reading. But that’s not because the story was deep or surprising—it’s because Crouch knows how to string you along with microcliffhangers and vaguely threatening tension. It’s literary fast food. Addictive, but ultimately unsatisfying.

The first third is full of mystery. But once the central reveal happens (Jason2 did a Kill and Replace, surprise!), the story becomes linear and weirdly predictable. The multiverse gets less interesting the more we see of it. There’s a constant feeling that the book could do something smart or twisty at any moment—and then doesn’t.

Logic/Relationships: 4.5/10

You want internal consistency? Too bad. This book is powered by emotion juice and hand-waving. The Box works because... you believe really hard. Or love someone really much. Or have unresolved trauma. That’s not science fiction—it’s manifestation with extra steps.

And the relationships? Shallow. We’re told Jason loves his wife and son more than anything—but we rarely see that love outside of generic flashbacks and obsessive narration. Daniela’s side of things is nearly absent. Charlie barely registers as a person. Amanda had chemistry with Jason, and the book just... deletes her.

Also: the AltJasons being willing to kill dozens of versions of themselves over a woman they haven't seen in months? That’s not romantic. That’s Love Makes You Evil taken to a toxic, vaguely incel-ish extreme. And Crouch never really interrogates that.

Enjoyment: 6.5/10

I enjoyed parts of it. The first act, specifically. But once the book revealed what it wasn’t going to do—interrogate its own premise, give emotional depth to its characters, explore its world with curiosity—I checked out emotionally. I was flipping pages by habit, not hunger.

This could have been a profound meditation on identity and choice. Instead, it’s a dude getting existential whiplash in a sci-fi escape room and then speed-running a multiverse of regrets until he finds a timeline where he doesn’t have to deal with the consequences.

Final Score: 5.9/10 — An aggressively mid-tier sci-fi thriller with a killer premise, breakneck pacing, and all the emotional depth of a Twitter thread about alternate realities. Entertaining, but deeply flawed.

Content Warnings

coco78337's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The best book I have ever had the pleasure to read.

Content Warnings

akswhy's review

3.5

adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

A good sci-fi novel, but a bit of a drag as a thriller. The last third was weakest. A little misogynistic at times.

Content Warnings

kturner_16's review

4.25

adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: N/A

Diverse cast of characters: N/A

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

manders_panda's review

4.0

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Content Warnings

linzvee's review

2.0

adventurous fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Loveable characters: No

Content Warnings

keaganbailey's review

3.0

adventurous dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The book starts off well, but by the end of chapter 1 you know exactly what's going on until near the last third. The plot until over 60% of the way through is straight forward, the main character doesn't even realize what happened to them until about 40%. This is frustrating as the reader as you're sitting around waiting for the book to catch up to where you know it's going.

The main character is one dimensional and does not change at all throughout the book, interestingly this ties into the plot and is excusable. What isn't excusable is that all other characters in the book are also one dimensional, the son could be replaced with a cardboard cutout the wife carries around and the story would not change dramatically. There are also several characters at the end of the story that the author explicitly tells the reader that they have "changed" but goes into no detail about this and does not explore the concept beyond the surface observation that their motivation has changed because the plot demands it.

As much as it pains me to say it, the show Rick & Morty has explored many of the concepts in this book and dulled the wonder of interacting yourself in a multiverse. But if you have not watched the show this book may be a 4 or 5 star for you.

If you enjoy the dilemma at the end of the book you will also really enjoy the game SOMA which came out in 2015, it goes on sale for $5 often.

Content Warnings

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