And Then I Woke Up

Product Information

The world was tipping, its weight shifting, and no one had noticed how precarious the ground beneath our feet had become. Part of the world believes certain facts that differ from another part of the world, even though they all are going through the same pandemic. It’s been happening for much longer than that, but Trump’s America has made clear that the concept of Fake News can divide an entire country. And there are way more people pouring fuel on that fire than there are trying to find a way to divert the coming conflagration. He can no longer believe what he sees, and therefore must rely on techniques his doctors have taught him to make sure he doesn’t go off the deep end again.

And while diving headfirst into the hyper individualistic attitudes that dominate the genre, he questions their utility.The idea is to confuse the reader with unreliable narrators, fear, uncertainty, maybe monsters (but maybe not), and mass hysteria, but also survivors coming out on the other side. A prescient premise drives this stunning weird tale from Devlin ( Unexpected Places to Fall from, Unexpected Places to Land): a disease renders the infected vulnerable to perceptions of relative realities, making them susceptible to “the fiction between the real and the perceived,” or what they refer to as “the narrative. Part of me is frustrated, and the other part—the bigger part, if I’m being honest—likes it better this way.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Night means darkness, darkness means introspection, introspection dredges up all kinds of monsters and my god, do those bastards keep us busy until dawn. To the point where the concept of any objective truth is under attack by what one side considers to be the barbarians at the gate and vice versa. Devlin has Spence walk the reader through his conception of it, parroting the sterilized medical and psychological explanations to induce goosebumps.

What stuck in my mind after I turned the last page was the question of which side truth was really on? Still, it's short, it's a interesting, different take on zombies, and it's certainly not bad - just not a good fit for me. Spence was an engrossing narrator, dancing between hard facts and his subjective perspective with the ease of a drunken marionette. 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.But something about it just didn't connect with me, it was a good audiobook but not enough for 4 or more stars. In the tradition of Mira Grant and Stephen Graham Jones, Malcolm Devlin's And Then I Woke Up is a creepy, layered, literary story about false narratives and their ability to divide us. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Both of them committed gruesome acts of violence when they were afflicted with the zombie hallucinations, convinced that they were surviving the apocalypse.