When Jason regains consciousness he’s in a strange installation, greeted as the returning hero by a host of people who seem to know him well, while he never met a single one of them. One night, Jason accepts the invitation to the party of a former colleague and friend, who just won a prestigious prize for his breakthrough research, and for a brief moment we see Jason’s shell of contentment crack, even though it’s a passing thought, easily shaken off.Īt that point I knew that something had to happen, that the idyllic picture had to be broken, and indeed as Jason is walking back home he’s assailed by a masked man who kidnaps him and brings him to an abandoned power plant, where he injects his victim with some unknown substance.
Both Jason and his wife Daniela had to give up some of their youthful dreams – he of pursuing his scientific research, she her artistic inclinations – when Daniela became pregnant with their son Charlie and they choose to marry and build a family, but neither of them seems to openly regret that sacrifice. Jason Dessen is a physics professor in Chicago, a man whose life is running on comfortable tracks – if a little predictable and boring: he’s happily married, he and his wife have a teenage son, they are financially well-off and experience no troubles of any kind – the picture of the perfect suburban life. But in the case of Dark Matter I think those sentences describe perfectly the effect the story had on me, the way it pulled me in and held me under its spell until I finished it and the proof of the potency of such a spell lies in the fact that I did not start to question the (few and far between, granted) small inconsistencies in this fascinating narrative until I closed the book.
Book blurbs once tended to use the phrases “a page turner!” and/or “unputdownable!” to advertise a book that would grab its readers and not let go until the very end, and over the years I’ve become a little wary of such emphasis because more often than not it led me down the path of disappointment.
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