Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay Mcleod Chapman

I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – 7/1

Price – £9.99 paperback £7.99 Kindle eBook

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?

The promise of freedom the internet once seemed to offer us feels increasingly more like falling into a trap. The idea of myriad sites all appealing to niche tastes has vanished and instead we have a small group of corporations dominating the world. Into this replacing the web forums and message boards are now social media titans offering new enticing dopamine hits that seem to know all the key buttons of human nature to get us addicted. In Clay McLeod Chapman’s new horror novel Wake Up And Open Your Eyes we have this taken to extremes with a more supernatural explanation for how bad things are going to get which overall deliver an unsettling tale but one I have a few issues with.

Noah Fairchild has learned to be nervous of his parent’s phone calls. Increasingly the impact of right-wing cable news has taken their lives over and he has to deal with their views that his beloved New York is a Hellscape, their inherent racism even when their daughter-in-law is Haitian, and their grandchild is mixed race but now they constantly mention a Great Awakening. Their last message though reaches a new level of disturbing and while he initially attempts to get his corporate middle manger brother Asher to get involved eventually Noah decides he needs to travel eight hours to see for himself what has happened to his parents. What he finds is horrific and is heralding something truly terrible about to sweep America.

The start of this novel is a set of scenes you will not forget in a hurry. Chapman cleverly uses that common fear of us seeing our parents change into people we don’t recognise, be it through changing politics or just old age and creates a series of escalating gruesome and disturbing scenes. They’re top-class visceral horror and it’s the type of start you will soon commit to seeing where this novel goes. A brilliant nightmare start; however for me the book feels while that it is great at creating disturbing imagery does not quite grab all its ideas together cohesively to move it into a truly great horror tale.

After the shock of seeing Noah meet the parents, we move to Noah’s brother Asher and go back a few months to see what happened to his family. Asher is more middle-class classical republican with a stay-at-home wife named Devon and his two sons teenager Caleb and young Marcus. Each of these family members has an encounter that starts to change them. Devon finds a yoga partner who inspires her but seems to send her down a road of internet fraud and Instagram wellness. Ash finds a commonality with his father in how the evening Fax News Channel (not in any way representing similar sounding named channels at all) is finally releasing all his pent-up aggression and Caleb is finding finally on social media someone sees him at last and respects him too. There is a sequence of incidents and escalations where we see each family member plunged into darker and darker places. Body horror, mental pressures and how the world treats them combine to create something nasty in each person. Chapman explores how people’s desire to feel something can pull them into places in the web all ready to be corrupted and add in supernatural influences and those get increasingly more exaggerated and bloodier. It’s a simple american family all turned into radicalized dangerous people filled with conspiracy theories, right wing propaganda and incel tendencies. At a character level these all work and the aftermaths are shown and are indeed horror inducing but I did feel we lacked spending time with Asher’s family prior to this. I wanted to see the seeds of destruction and why these people changed so much. What are the circumstances that make people turn into these types of people. Instead, it feels to focus more on the more simplistic message that social media alone changes which while I’m sympathetic to feels like it’s missing both the cultural angles and the big business angles behind such media targeting it in ways perhaps even demons did not see. These sections of the book are horrible, but I feel lack the true power to provoke a debate which is where the novel has a strength over a short story or novella.

The final third of the book returns to Noah and his further adventures in an american hellscape but also littered with various disturbing social media interviews, videos and chats. Again, this is effective, but it feels very at a very full-on speed and perhaps a little too neatly pulled together into a box of horrible tricks. It is filled with alarming images and is a true walk through a living nightmare, but Noah is not a character we’ve sent too much time with to follow their experiences. In many ways I felt unusually this is more the kind of epic horror story that perhaps needed a little more time to build up the events and perhaps a bigger cast to show us the different ways media corrupt than simply one unlucky family being hit by them all at once. Instead, this feels more slimmed down illustrative horror than one really getting its teeth into the subject.

Despite these caveats this was a tale I couldn’t let go of once I started. Those opening scenes are incredibly powerful and set up where this book is taking readers, and it is indeed uncompromising how much horror awaits. Punches are not pulled, and dark places are visited. I think with a little more investigation of the subject this could have really cast a light on modern 21st century America (and possibly the wider world following its shadow) but instead a cautionary warning is what we get and that also can be enough. An interesting and disturbing read awaits.