Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
Hardcover | Kindle | Audiobook
By Clay McLeod Chapman
Publisher: Quirk Books
Release Date: January 7, 2025

An obsession with social media and far-right news programs sends an average American family into a downward spiral, causing mass hysteria and an epidemic of supernatural proportions in Clay McLeod Chapman‘s daring new social horror Wake Up and Open Your Eyes.

Brainwashing is nothing new, but thanks to the availability, expeditiousness, and addictiveness of the Internet and 24-hour news programs, more people are susceptible to it than ever before. Influencers push their lifestyle brands and sponsored products with greater reach on social media; spammers and bots easily deceive users with their more sophisticated programming; and political pundits are on TV around the clock aggressively spewing their opinions.

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes explores these dynamics through the family of Brooklyn resident Noah Fairchild. Noah becomes concerned about his parents in Virginia, who have been calling a lot to warn him of a “reckoning” they say is coming soon. They’re talking more about conspiracy theories and spewing buzzwords and news headlines now that they’re addicted to watching a far-right news program. This is particularly odd considering his parents were never even political before. It’s gotten so bad that Noah feels like he doesn’t even recognize his parents anymore. Little does he know, it’s far worse than anyone could even imagine. After his parents and brother all stop answering their phones, Noah drives back to his southern hometown to check on his family. What he finds there is not only horrific, it’s become widespread — a “Great Reawakening” that’s left people across the country zombie-like, possessed, and violent.

In his new book, Chapman takes a bold stab at extreme conservative America, appealing to readers whose relatives have gotten hooked on fear-mongering far-right propaganda, regurgitating conspiracy theories, and getting hacked and catfished online because of it. This was a pretty big risk, considering just how many Americans have been sucked into rhetoric from outlets like Fox News and seem to make it their whole personalities now. But in today’s political and social climate, that part of the story is a timely one. Just do a Google search for “lost parents to fox news” and you’ll find tons of instances about people who, like Noah, no longer recognize their own parents.

But Chapman only slightly touches on the specific far-right issues of the day — the Sandy Hook conspiracies, immigrant “invasions,” transgender rights, etc. He assumes the reader is already acquainted with them. He doesn’t make any effort to refute or debate the issues; he points out in the book that Noah’s research on “how to deprogram your parents” was a fruitless effort. Instead, Chapman focuses on how radicalization goes from manipulating the mind to deteriorating the body and soul.

As Noah’s family members become more obsessed with the imminent “reckoning,” their fear and frustration starts to manifest on the outside, changing their appearance in grotesque ways and making them act insane, even harming themselves. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes makes the 1988 John Carpenter movie They Live seem like a children’s story in comparison.

For readers with personal experience of losing relatives who’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is an emotionally charged, deeply unsetting read. It will feel all too familiar. The repetition in Chapman’s writing is effective in mirroring the indoctrination process and is necessary to reproduce how influencers and propagandists connect with their audience, but at times the 384-page novel felt overly long. The novel perhaps would have benefitted from having the Fairchild family’s descent into madness as the sole focus and skipped Noah’s less impactful journey back north, which only briefly touched upon what this epidemic has done to American society.

But if it’s horror you want, Chapman delivers spectacularly in that area, as always. Like with the author’s 2023 body horror offering “What Kind of Mother” (which was my favorite book of that year!), prepare to be shocked, horrified, and grossed out. While the book includes vivid descriptions — melted skin, scalped heads, a few blender incidents — it’s not depicted in a slasher/gorefest Terrifier way. Rather, it’s a slow psychological burn as ordinary people mutilate themselves trying to achieve unrealistic goals; as they destroy themselves with their own fears and obsessions; and how the seemingly average person can turn on their loved ones and throw away the lives they’ve built because they don’t truly appreciate what they have.

While it might have benefited from a shorter page count, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes delivers a horrifying, thought-provoking tale that uses the current social and political issues of modern-day United States as a harrowing backdrop for its chilling narrative that will leave an indelible impression on readers for years to come.