Noah has been losing his 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 her many conspiracy theories. But when his phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles and his parents locked in a terrifying trancelike state in front of the TV. Panicked, Noah attempts to snap them out of it.
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 glued to a screen. 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?
I recently fell pretty much in love with Clay McLeod Chapman’s 2023 horror novel, WHAT KIND OF MOTHER. It was the first book of his that I read & I just adored it. It was bleak, and moody, and really fucking creepy. And also very emotiona & raw. It made an instant fan out of me & so I was really excited to pick up another of his books.
His most recent book, WAKE UP AND OPEN YOUR EYES is a wildly different vibe, for sure. Less somber & more shocking. It’s funny. It’s fucking gross, too. And it’s about as politically subtle as a baseball bat to the face.
I think the only big issue I had with this book was due to its structure, and I’ll try to explain what I mean as I go along in the review. Overall, I really enjoyed this & would highly recommend it. I think what I felt was that a combination of the synopsis being a bit misleading & my own expectations being skewed just meant…I got a very different reading experience from what I was expecting.
Also, wow. The book would have been timely no matter when I read it, but it felt extra timely as I was reading this book when Charlie Kirk was shot & killed. As I said, this book is overtly political, and if you’ve ever thought to yourself (like I do, every minute of every day) “It’s a cult” in regards to the GOP & its most extreme followers, you’re in for a gnarly little treat!
Noah Fairchild is a liberal man living in Brooklyn with his wife & daughter. He grew up in Virginia, where his parents still live.
His parents, who spend their days watching Fax News (remember I said this book was unsubtle!), being fed xenophobia & homophobia & racism over the airwaves. “JUST THE FAX!” is the slogan of Fax News.
Noah gets a disturbing voicemail from his Mom, and after being unable to get either of his parents to pick up the phone, he decides to drive home to check on them. What he finds in his childhood home is…alarming. To say the very least. His parents have become brainwashed. Mindless. And very, very violent.
So, again, based on the way the synopsis reads, I kind of expected to spend the whole novel with Noah & his nephew. But what happens is, the story shifts away from Noah’s POV for an absolutely massive chunk of the book (after only spending around 70 pages with Noah to begin with), and we don’t see him again until around page 250. And the book is only around 375 pages.
And Noah feels like the only character that McLeod wrote to be remotely likable. So yeah, that aspect of the book frustrated me a little. I definitely grew to like Noah over the course of the book, and I can’t help but wonder what this book might have been like had the focus stayed on him.
But the book shifts to focus on Noah’s brother Asher and his family. As one by one (with one exception, the aforementioned nephew), they fall under the technological spell that is leaving huge swathes of American citizens nothing more than slavering, cannibalistic, hyper-sexualized zombies.
Good times, good times.
This book goes places, man. Really fucked-up places. It’s horrifying. Disgusting. Reprehensible. I was shocked. I was uncomfortable. I laughed. Which made me more uncomfortable. This feels like Clay McLeod Chapman totally unfiltered, just gleefully unhinged, with no limits in sight.
You may never look at a blender the same way. I sure won’t.
I’m a huge fan of anything zombie/apocalyptic, and I like how different stories can feel depending on when it’s set during said apocalypse. And while WAKE UP AND OPEN YOUR EYES isn’t explicitly apocalyptic, it absolutely takes on the flavor of the very early days of a zombie apocalypse.
While I definitely preferred the more somber, character-driven vibe of WHAT KIND OF MOTHER, I had a blast reading WAKE UP AND OPEN YOUR EYES.
Big thanks to Quirk Books for sending this one my way!!
Grimdark Dad 