Review: Dark Matter

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was recommended this book by my brother-in-law Danny. He gave a pretty accurate description as a mixture of romance, suspense/thriller, and sci-fi.

This was definitely an interesting book that had a number of twists. (view spoiler)[It's definitely one of those books where you know everything is going to work out for the protagonist, no matter how bad things seem to get. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I personally don't mind that comforting cloak of invincibility around protagonists. I was actually surprised that both real Daniel and Charlie survived. I thought he would lose at least one (my bet was on Charlie). I guess Crouch figured that Jason had had enough from seeing his wife die twice already. (hide spoiler)]

The thing I really disliked about this book is Crouch's pervasive use of one-sentence paragraphs. I am tempted to count to see the ratio of how many one-sentence (or one-phrase) non-dialogue paragraphs he has compared to multi-sentence non-dialogue paragraphs. It feels incredibly choppy, and it was very distracting for me. I understand that it is simulating the disorientation that Jason is feeling, but I felt it didn't really produce that because it was so overused.

So I actually did count the number of one-sentence non-dialogue paragraphs and multi-sentence non-dialogue paragraphs in Chapter 1, just to see. I might have miscounted one or two in there, but I counted 262 one-sentence paragraphs and only 70 multi-sentence paragraphs. I was already feeling annoyed with these things after Chapter 1, but I felt like maybe it was excusable since it's a pretty exciting chapter. But this keeps going at about the same pace for the rest of the book, and it just felt like watching a cheesy TV show with the camera angle changing every second.

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