Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman: Review by Gabino Iglesias
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Clay McLeod Chapman (Quirk 978-1-68369-395-6, $24.99, 384pp, hc) January 2025. Cover by Andie Reid.
Being a fan of an author and reading everything they publish is a lot of fun, and it’s even more fun when the author in question constantly changes what they do. Clay McLeod Chapman is a horror fiction chameleon, and his novels show that. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, McLeod’s latest, is a timely, gory, and very political horror novel about how sometimes the news and the algorithm can change people in very significant ways. Gorier than anything the author has given us before and packed with harrowing scenes and social commentary, this is one of those novels that not everyone is going to like, but those who do will absolutely love it.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is made up of three different parts that feature the same family. Noah, the protagonist that carries the first and third parts of the novel, becomes worried when his parents, who live six hours away, don’t answer his phone calls. Sadly, his brother, who lives much closer, also ignores Noah’s attempts at communication. When Noah finally arrives at his parents’ place, he finds them transformed, zombified, waiting for the ‘‘Great Reawakening’’ that a Fax News anchor keeps talking about. In the horrific few hours that follow, Noah is forced to attack his parents to stay alive.
The second part of the novel follows Noah’s brother and his family as they suffer the same fate as Noah’s parents: mom with the ‘‘sirens’’ of wellness she sees on Instagram, the kids to YouTube and social media, and Noah’s brother thanks to Fax News, just like his father. The Great Reawakening needs soldiers, and each of them is convinced they have been called to lead the charge. As the calls individually and collectively slide into discord, the world around them is undergoing the same process.
The last part of the novel returns to Noah after the Great Reawakening is in full of swing. Conservative folks who watch Fax News are attacking people, having orgies out in the open, and killing those who aren’t like them; those who aren’t white. The Great Awakening throws the United States into a state of chaos. Death, violence, and orgies are everywhere, and Noah needs to find a way home on foot – from Virginia to New York – if he ever wants to see his family again.
My own work has always been very political, so I know how some readers react to that, and this novel goes hard in that regard. Everyone watching Fax News is angry and afraid because ‘‘they’’ are ruining the country and corrupting their kids: ‘‘Whoever they were was anybody’s guess: Terrorists. Transsexuals. The government. The world was full of degenerate people wanting to slither into his house and corrupt his defenseless wife and innocent children.’’
While McLeod’s politics might be too much for some and the amount of gore in this narrative would easily make it fit under ‘‘hardcore’’ horror and the strangeness almost makes it bizarro fiction, the author’s commitment to making a point is admirable and makes this a necessary read, even more so at a time where many of the things that appear in the novel are also appearing in the news.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes started as a short story that appeared in Found: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror Stories. The story was great, but obviously this novel packs much, much more. In fact, it might pack too much. The gore is amazing, the politics are on point, and the level of brutality – physical, psychological, and emotional – are superb. However, halfway through the second part, the novel’s pace slows down and a bit of repetition creeps in. Then, the last part of the book stretches for way too long.
McLeod has established himself as one of the most entertaining voices in contemporary horror with superb novels like Ghost Eaters and What Kind of Mother. Readers already know he can do grief horror like no one else and that he has a knack for creepy things. Now, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes shows the author’s most politically engaged, savage side, and for those of us who are fans of his work, the novel is a welcome addition to his oeuvre and proof that when it comes to changing things around, McLeod is horror fiction’s David Bowie.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the March 2025 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.
©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.
