But if he can’t tell the truth from the lies, how will he know if he has earned the redemption he dreams of? It also reminded me quite a lot of a certain Black Mirror episode, but not enough that it felt like a copy – just both having the same beautifully creepy and sinister vibes. Whether the book is a science fiction epic, or short jaunt through a fantastical realm, I’m always game when that lethal marketing combination is aimed my way. I was already used to looking out for myself and keeping away from the deep gravity wells of other people's trouble. Even Spence, who has been on both sides of the apocalypse as an infected and a cured, still seems uncertain as to whether he’s figured things out, even though he claims to have “woken up.

And now we get to the point of the book, the burden of this And Then I Woke Up book review—what is the truth? Didn't feel invested to the characters, except for Leila but that was only at the very very end when we actually get a little back story on her. Full of empathy, Devlin's book embraces hard questions but doesn't lose itself trying to provide easy answers.Two years prior to the start of the novella, the narrator, Lewis “Spence” Spencer, was infected, and, believing that patrons at the restaurant where he worked had turned into a pack of cannibalistic monsters, he and fellow believer Macey killed more than 30 people. If there aren’t any physical signs to look for, how does he know if he’s not slipping back into the disease? The point being that the world has ended and having a boring life is one of the survivor's biggest fantasy. On the outside, Spence seeks redemption for the atrocities he committed as he tries to determine which narrative is true. Our protagonist Spence is living at the Ironside Rehabilitation Facility and must navigate this terrifying new reality.

Devlin has Spence walk the reader through his conception of it, parroting the sterilized medical and psychological explanations to induce goosebumps. Elements of this fable will surely resonate with contemporary readers living in a world where “alternative” facts and competing narratives have driven people to violence and death, and a virus is just one of the natural, social, political, and cultural upheavals that have polarized the population and led them to perceive those on the other side of the divide as monsters or idiots. Escape Rating B+: I’ll admit that I wanted an unequivocal ending to this, where the point-of-view character does finally wake up, take the red pill or the blue pill, and learn what is real. The subtle way they help the teller, the subversive way they reach the listener, how they creep inside you like waking dreams. I did quite enjoy the read and clearly am recommending it with 4 out of 5 ravens; I just wanted to let you know what fell short on the perfect score, and I do believe my complaints are minor and more likely personal over how others will read the story.

If you enjoy post-apocalyptic stories with a twist and a healthy (but not overly on-the-nose) commentary on some of the uglier sides of humanity, I highly recommend checking it out! You can ask a thousand people what they think and each will answer, but you have no way of knowing if they are telling the truth or what you want to hear or what they want you to believe. One day, he walks up to a broken-down van, says he wants to wake up out loud, and he’s carried off to be cured of his disease. It’s hard to argue with that visual, and yet Spence has been diagnosed with a disease that warps his reality. Horror is still a pretty new genre for me, and I get to have that exciting reading experience of working out what I do and don’t like in a certain genre.

That said, I did enjoy our narrator as a storyteller very much, so I suppose the book's flaws are also its qualities, in a sense (can you see now why I'm struggling to rate and review this? His first collection, You Will Grow Into Them was published by Unsung Stories in 2017 and shortlisted for the British Fantasy and Saboteur Awards.

Malcolm Devlin’s (he/him) stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, The Shadow Booth, and Shadows and Tall Trees.