Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a horror novel about an apocalypse brought about by right-wing news and social media in the USA. Noah’s parents have been parroting far-right views for a while now, but when his mother leaves a cryptic message and then can’t be contacted, he drives from Brooklyn to Virginia to check on them, but what he finds is his parents in a weird state, trying to attack him. Then it turns out they aren’t the only ones, and Noah’s brother and his family have fallen victim too, and then Noah and his nephew must try and make it back to Brooklyn, through the radicalised hordes.
I’ve been hearing about this novel for a while, and even though I didn’t really enjoy the only other Clay McLeod Chapman book I’ve read, I wanted to give this one a go, and I’m glad I did. The satire in this is very explicit—there’s Fax News, there’s influencer juice cleanses, there’s Baby Ghost to the tune of Baby Shark—and the horror is too, with memorable moments of gore and sex. This isn’t for the faint-hearted, and a good recent comparison is Alison Rumfitt’s work: if you enjoy that, you’ll be able to handle the stuff in this, with Tell Me I’m Worthless cited at the end in a list of influences and useful works for writing the book. I enjoyed that it was more extreme, not shying away from ideas of possession and what horrible things that makes people do to their bodies.
The structure is more experimental than most apocalypse stories, focusing mostly on the initial moment in the first part, then the build up in the second, and then just after that initial moment in the final section, which is intercut with lots of found footage moments to give a sense of the scale of devastation. This format doesn’t give much space for connection with the central figure, Noah, but you delve further into the minds of his brother Asher and Asher’s family, and it’s not the sort of horror where you need a deep connection as it is more about the shock of what is happening more generally than specifically what is happening to Noah. The ending doesn’t give much closure or explanation, and perhaps lacks a really memorable closing moment, but it also plays on a ‘liberal’ idea that such an apocalypse could be easily recovered from, suggesting that far-right threats aren’t just something to ignore.
I really like horror that blends together modern fears with classic horror elements like possession, and Wake Up and Open Your Eyes feels like an American version of Alison Rumfitt’s work, exploring the visceral horror of media radicalisation and far-right views. The middle section, about how one family got to that point, was perhaps the strongest part for me, especially in light of this theme, but overall this is a great horror novel that doesn’t shy away from being in your face, and you just can’t shut your eyes.
Fiendfully Reading 
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