book cover of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
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Wake Up and Open Your Eyes

(2025)
A novel by

 
 
The Americans meets The Exorcist as a suburban family are radicalised by a demonic force, seeping through social media and twenty-four hour news cycles. Perfect for fans of Delilah S. Dawson, Gretchen Felker-Martin and Jordan Peele.

Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the ‘Great Reckoning''' is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trance-like state in front of the TV. Panicked, Noah attempts to snap them out of it and get medical help.

Then Noah’s mother brutally attacks him.

But Noah isn’t the only person to be attacked by a loved one. Families across the country are tearing each other apart-–literally-–as people succumb to a form of possession that gets worse the more time they spend watching particular channels, using certain apps, or visiting certain websites. In Noah’s Richmond-based family, only he and his young nephew Marcus are unaffected. Together, they must race back to the safe haven of Brooklyn–-but can they make it before they fall prey to the violent hordes?

This ambitious, searing novel from "one of horror's modern masters" holds a mirror to our divided nation, and will shake readers to the core.


Genre: Horror

Praise for this book

"Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a fever-pitched maelstrom of modern-day anxieties and terrors." - Nat Cassidy

"Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is the scariest book I have read in years. It's a book for our times and I can't stop thinking about it." - V Castro

"A harrowing horror experience. Like watching through a window as the world explodes, realizing too late you should have sought shelter." - Johnny Compton

"This novel is relentless and utterly merciless. Chapman takes unflinching aim at modern American culture and nobody is safe in this brutal, insightful apocalypse!" - Christopher Golden

"A profoundly terrifying, riveting, intense, nerve-shredding modern horror epic. This is Clay McLeod Chapman at the peak of his craft. Brilliant." - Rachel Harrison

"Wake Up and Open Your Eyes doesn't just hit close to home - it's a needle sliding under your skin until you bleed, a rabbit hole stocked with terror all the way down." - Christina Henry

"An eye-opening sociopolitical fever nightmare that you won't soon forget." - Ai Jiang

"The Purge ain't got nothin' on this." - Stephen Graham Jones

"Gut-wrenching, grief-soaked, the book perfectly embodies the panic of seeing the people you love transform into monsters. An utterly disconcerting mirror held up to the terror of our present." - Cassandra Khaw

"A searing and deeply unnerving apocalyptic thriller executed with the true nerve of a master storyteller." - Eric LaRocca

"A damn roller coaster of a novel, the kind that leaves you shaking and shrieking and smiling. [Chapman] takes all that's troubling our nation in the current day and, somehow, makes it all the more frightening." - Victor LaValle

"Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is supercharged, gloriously maximalist, terrifying, and disgusting. But mostly it's tragic, and hits much closer to home than any of us want it to." - CJ Leede

"The proximity of Chapman's demons is enough to make one lock the doors, turn off the television, [and] curl into a ball in the dark. . . . A sparkling variety of narration, mad vivid energy, and even brilliantly funny bits." - Josh Malerman

"Clay McLeod Chapman is one of my favorite horror storytellers working today." - Jordan Peele

"This is social horror at its most compelling." - Cynthia Pelayo

"Surreal, hypnotic, unrelenting, profoundly claustrophobic, and an absolutely scathing sendup of the pitfalls of American divisiveness." - Keith Rosson

"Fabulously unhinged, this book is a hilarious and terrifying jamboree of modern-day horrors. Gory, chilling, and exhilarating, the book knows to relish its delicious madness. I haven't had such a thrill in ages!" - Gerardo Sámano Córdova

"With Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Chapman isn't merely checking the pulse of America - he's tapping the vein. And trust me, there's blood everywhere. This book throbs with body horror and familial conflict and, most notably, the sociopolitical nightmare we find ourselves in." - Chuck Wendig

"Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a pedal-to-the-metal, body horror mash-up of The Purge, Pontypool, and Malcolm Devlin's And Then I Woke Up. Chapman has an absolute gift for the unforgettably, mind-saturatingly horrific, and I shall be sending him my therapy bill." - Ally Wilkes

"A modern American classic. Clay McLeod Chapman's panic-inducing, adrenaline-fueled epic digs its fingers into the cracks in twenty-first-century life and pries them open to expose the rot beneath." - Josh Winning


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