Dark Matter

Dark Matter is a 2016 novel by Blake Crouch, published by Crown as a 342-page book.

Jason Dessen is a physics professor with a wife and son in Chicago, and the book's opening is an abduction: a masked man takes him at gunpoint, drives him to an abandoned industrial site and injects him with a drug. When he wakes, a stranger greets him as though he has been away, and everything about his circumstances has been replaced, which is how the novel establishes that reality itself is the subject rather than a hazard within it. In the life he wakes into, his wife is not his wife, his son was never born, and his work is not the work he knows, while the man who greets him behaves as though he has simply been away.

The question the publisher poses is which world is the dream and how he can return to the family he loves. The book was adapted into a television series created by Crouch that premiered on a streaming service in May 2024 and was renewed in August 2024.