Synopsis:
Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the “Great Reawakening” is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trance-like state in front of the TV. Panicked, Noah attempts to snap them out of it and get medical help.
Then Noah’s mother brutally attacks him.
But Noah isn’t the only person to be attacked by a loved one. Families across the country are tearing each other apart-–literally-–as people succumb to a form of possession that gets worse the more time they spend watching particular channels, using certain apps, or visiting certain websites. In Noah’s Richmond-based family, only he and his young nephew Marcus are unaffected. Together, they must race back to the safe haven of Brooklyn–-but can they make it before they fall prey to the violent hordes?
This ambitious, searing novel from “one of horror’s modern masters” holds a mirror to our divided nation, and will shake readers to the core.
Review:
I’ve loved everything I’ve read from Clay McLeod Chapman, and I’ve read quite a bit. His What Kind of Mother is right up there at the top of my list for the great horror novels of the twenty-first century, and it’s emblematic of all the things I love about his work: deep character work, literary style, palpable grief, and the kind of horror that creeps up on you and finally leaves you saying, “Hey, what the actual fuck?”
There’s plenty to admire in Chapman’s latest, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, but it doesn’t bear much of a resemblance to anything else in his oeuvre. Here, the horror is in-your-face, brutal almost to the point of comedy, the characters are (very intentionally) types, and much of the latter half is narrated by an imaginary Anderson Cooper.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes focuses on the extended members of the Fairchild family, a “typical” suburban American family. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and young daughter, while the rest of his family lives back in Virginia. As the story opens, Noah realizes something is wrong when his parents won’t answer the phone, and the next thing you know, he’s driving down to check on them. When he arrives, he finds his parents transformed into zombie-like near-catatonics, repeating television catch phrases, wallowing in their own filth, and finally turning violent.
What Noah doesn’t realize yet is that this is no isolated incident. Similar scenes are occurring all across the nation, transforming the U.S. into the site of an apocalyptic paranormal event. And soon we’re following Noah on a trek from Virginia to New York, trying to make it home amid the violence and orgies of a populace gone mad.
One thing that makes Wake Up and Open Your Eyes different is that it’s much less a horror novel (despite its horrific content) than a satire. What makes the satire hard to carry off is the fact that modern American life is already so ludicrous that it’s almost satire-proof. The Onion can’t write a headline that rivals the real-world events bombarding us every single day.
But Chapman gives it his all.
Over the course of the novel, Chapman takes shots at Fox News, ipad babies, incels, and the through-line from hippy wellness culture to fascism, refiguring them all as demonic influences, possession through our screens, a great spiritual attack on a world too secular–and too isolated from one another–to fight back.
In isolation, many of these topics have been tackled in horror literature (E.K. Sathue’s Youthjuice being a personal favorite), but Chapman’s aim is so broad that it leaves little room for nuance. They seem like easy targets, which seems like a weird thing to say while we live through the literal end of democracy due to the impact of just these social influences.
One problem might be that none of these influences are ever allowed to appear actually appealing. They are all cartoonishly vapid and evil from the get-go, even (or especially) the viral youtube video, “Baby Ghost.”
Chapman is sure to save some vitriol for those city-dwelling liberal elites (Fair and Balanced, after all), but it feels a bit like an afterthought in a book that is really a kind of primal scream at the abhorrent stupidity of this historical moment. And structurally, the book spends a bit too much time with Noah’s brother’s family, watching them plunge further and further into the demonic rabbit hole, while there might have been a much more satisfying road trip structure to guide us through the carnage.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes shows Chapman stretching, flexing his muscles, aiming for something a little different, and even if it doesn’t always connect, it’s still a wild ride conducted by a writer of great skill, and it’s certainly worth the cost of the ticket.
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