Wake Up and Open Your Eyes Review

Clay Mcleod Chapman's latest leaves no one spared.

This is a book that you experience, not just read. This is a book that you survive to tell the tale. As friends of mine began getting early copies of this book and reading it, a theme began to take shape, this book was bonkers. Then I listened to Chapman himself on different podcasts and interviews where he seemed almost apologetic for what readers were going to experience in this book. So I went in feeling like I was prepared for whatever horrors this book was going to throw my way.

I was wrong.

Chapman has created something truly remarkable with this book. It is razor sharp, cutting social commentary and satire, and it is one of the most viscerally horrific experiences that I’ve had in a long, long time.

So what is it about? Chapman essentially follows one family as they navigate an apocalypse that is very different than the zombie, alien, or nuclear apocalypses with which we are more familiar. This one attacks, possesses through different forms of media, some obvious, some not as obvious. The book opens as our bumbling liberal hero Noah returns to his childhood home in Richmond to check on his suddenly ultra right wing parents, and what he finds there is not pretty. At all. The first part of the book is one long sequence, and it is very effective, at times very scary, and gross.

The second part of the book is an absolute masterpiece, focusing on Noah’s older brother and his family as they slowly become affected by this event. By the end of this section, I was not doing well. I was frazzled. I was disgusted. I laughed. I thought. I had run through just about every emotion a person is capable of, and I still had a third of the book to go.

I won’t go into any details on the third part of the book, but it’s pretty much 120 pages of the shit absolutely hitting the fan.

Is this a liberal book? Yes. Does it put the microscope on liberals, too? Absolutely. No one comes off smelling like roses here. Inaction is an action when action is required, and our “hero” often completely fails in this capacity throughout the book.

It has been a rough ten years politically for anyone that cares about empathy, justice, or basic kindness and decency. Chapman has clearly felt this deeply and channeled that rage into this book. It is a howl of pain, frustration, sadness, and shock at what so many people have become. People that we called friends, people in our family, that slowly, insidiously, became someone else. Someone we didn’t recognize anymore. Someone that hated people like us and we hated people like them. And how the hell do you navigate a reality where your family has become something that you honestly think of as evil?

There are no easy answers provided by Chapman here. But that title is as much to us as it has anything to do with what is happening in the book. Ultimately, we need to wake up and open our eyes and do something, before it’s too late.

Obviously, it is January and there are a lot of great books to come, but I don’t foresee a future where this book doesn’t end up on my favorites of the year.