What if quantum mechanics could impact the macro-scale world, such as in Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment? And someone wrote a thriller about it?
Anyway, here's a brief non-spoiler review of Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. A book popular enough to get a TV adaptation.
Dark Matter is a thriller about the many-worlds hypothesis, ie that the universe continually branches into a multiverse of all things that could happen, as they do indeed happen in different simultaneous timelines. In this case, technology allows a man to move across those timelines, with various ramifications that follow.
The writing/prose quality was great. No complaints. And it was a page-turner for sure, as any good thriller is supposed to be.
Characters were mostly solid. A handful of character decisions/arcs seemed wasted/unfulfilled (a therapist character in particular), but I have no major complaints.
In terms of plot, I liked the premise and the first two thirds. The final third kind of lost me. I won't go into spoilers but basically there's a twist that, while I like it on the surface, was handled in a way that came off as sillier than was probably intended. And a conflict that could have been tighter and more personal was expanded beyond what it needed to be.
Admittedly, pure thrillers generally aren't my favorite genre, since I like a bit more meat on the bones to think about afterward versus a book that optimizes for constant non-stop tension. I don't like ultra-long series that drag things out unnecessarily, but I do like sufficient length and thematic complexity beyond what most thrillers offer. A sci-fi thriller can potentially hit a sweet spot, but from reading two Crouch books so far, I generally deviate from his vision in the final third; not a big fan of how he's tended to land things in the end, and yet paradoxically I would be happy to give like 20% more page time as a reader if it would help flesh them out more (whereas publishers are generally like "no, gotta tighten that word count up for a thriller".
I did enjoy the reading experience, overall. I'd say it was a 4/5 in-the-moment experience for me, but drops to 3.5/5 in terms of long-term impact and thoughtfulness. If I was more a fan of the thriller genre I'd probably keep it in the 4+ range.
