And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin
Mass brainwashing upends reality — but who are the real monsters?
It’s the end of the world.
How did it begin? One lazy Saturday, normal people everywhere suddenly started morphing into murderous flesh-eating monsters. Society very quickly went to shit. Survivors fled the cities and the suburbs and formed makeshift communities in the wilderness — only occasionally venturing into the detritus of former civilization to scavenge for supplies and fight off any zombies they encountered.
Very scary times. Except none of it is true. It’s all in the heads of the “survivors” — and, actually, it’s them who are the “infected.”
You see, the psychological brainwashing of the narrative pushed by the news, social media, and incalculable podcasts has somehow rewired the brains of a large swarth of the population. On that fateful Saturday, it was like a switch was flicked — suddenly the infected saw evil creatures all around them — and they responded by brutally murdering complete strangers, their colleagues, their friends, their own children.
And Then I Woke Up is a fascinating politically-charged horror novel for the post-truth age, when propaganda trumps reality and all that matters is who said the thing. Whose side are they on?
As the novel puts it, “The truth is so poorly written. Given the choice, the pleasantly told lie is always more seductive. That’s why religion is so potent. Why history and science are still considered up for debate.”
The infected of the book are so far gone, that they don’t even interrogate the likelihood of finding fresh supplies on the shelves of the exact same abandoned grocery store every single time they go on a raid into town. They think themselves lucky somehow finding vitals cans of food that everyone else had missed previously. The truth is that the government regularly stocks the stores with care packages to deter the infected from venturing further into urban areas and causing more bloodshed.
It is a rip-roaring read, a lean page-turner of a novel that’s reminiscent of both Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but it has plenty of narrative twists and stylistic flourishes to announce Devlin as a major new voice in the horror literature landscape.
I should also mention the movie that came to mind while reading this novel: They Live. And Then I Woke Up evokes that movie because of the government’s efforts to jolt the infected out of their fantasy. These efforts include billboards and road markings containing messages like “Wake Up” and “This Isn’t Real.”
Another amusing tactic is their “random acts of grand surrealism” — such as an otherwise normal house containing a single room in which everything is neon pink or filled with balloons. Things so ridiculous that the infected does a double take, and then gradually comes to realize that so much of what they thought was real isn’t.
For anyone that read the recent novel Wake Up and Open Your Eyes and was severely unimpressed, then And Then I Woke Up is the book you’ve been wanting and deserve. I highly recommend it. It is intelligent, very well-written, and one hell of a fun ride.