BOOK REVIEW | WAKE UP AND OPEN YOUR EYES | CLAY McLEOD CHAPMAN

 

Today’s post is a look at the new book by Clay McLeod Chapman. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. 

It is released early next year on 07 JANUARY 2025 by Titan Books.

The Americans meets The Exorcist as a suburban family are radicalised by a demonic force, seeping through social media and twenty-four hour news cycles. Perfect for fans of Delilah S. Dawson, Gretchen Felker-Martin and Jordan Peele.

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 Reckoning” 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.

Clay McLeod Chapman’s latest book is a nightmarish vision of conservative America gone mad – literally.

Noah Fairchild is a liberal American living in upstate New York with his wife and child. He comes from Middle America and his parents and siblings are stout conservatives, who at times have views that are totally dichotomous to Noah’s political standing, spouting the diatribe of far right news broadcasts, such as having views against immigration and the state of the nation, despite that fact that their granddaughter is the descendent of a Haitian mother.

In the days leading up Christmas, Noah receives a larger than normal amount of phone calls from his mother warning him that the situation in the city that he lives in is increasing in danger, and recites right wing rhetoric as well as the curious message that The Great Awakening is coming.  Naturally, Noah is a little bit worried about his mother’s mental wellbeing and ultimately takes a trip from his home to his parent’s house.

What he finds shocks him to his core, and starts a nightmarish journey through the United States to get back to his daughter.

Reading like The Sadness for conservative America, Wake Up and Open Your eyes is an intense and unrelenting nightmare of a book. There were scenes in this book that are pushed to the extreme, with one in particular that is seared indelibly onto my brain.

After witnessing the events in the UK earlier this year (with one of them happening at the end of my street), and also witnessing the use of social media to spread far right propaganda, this was a book that resonated with me immensely. Using possession as a vehicle to comment on the way that social media, right wing news and other forms of media insipidly worm its way into the brains of those that believe and spout these hateful views, Chapman uses horror as a vehicle to highlight the horrors these views can lead to.

Similar to Alison Rumfit’s Tell Me I’m Worthless, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes uses well-worn horror tropes and metamorphoses them into something prescient for the times that we live in.

The book will not be for everyone as it uses quite an experimental form of narrative and switches between different mediums and tenses like a jack rabbit. However, this bold structuring only strengthens the ideology behind the story. In fact, for me it reminded me of an anarcho punk aesthetic, again similar to Rumfitt’s Tell me I am Worthless.

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a brave, bold statement against the state of the nation and how far right conservatism is permeating through everyday society to radicalise and possess even the most liberal individual and highlights the grotesqueness of the world today.