And Then I Woke Up

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A mind-altering virus puts a stranglehold on the world and the survivors don’t know what to believe or who to trust. Imagine you're minding your own business, washing dishes in the backroom of a restaurant and one of the waitresses rushes into the kitchen freaking out and asking how to lock the swinging doors. Ominous titles portrayed on stunning covers that fill me with a sense of dread are a sure fire bet to getting my attention.

They begin a journey across the uninhabited land, discovering new facts and realities along the way.

That said, the book drags more than a bit in the middle, and while the end is satisfying in many ways, it lacked the punch I was somehow expecting. In the aftermath, Spence – one of the ‘cured’ at a rehab facility – is persuaded to break out by a new arrival who wants to track down her former friend/lover. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative.

And the measurement of those 60 seconds can still take the same amount of objective time while still seeming to be of different duration on the opposite sides of that door. 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. The last 20% or so of the novella was phenomenal and I loved watching things unfold, so I'm very happy that I kept going through the more boring elements of the middle.But after he befriends Leila, a new inmate, and learns her story, he must consider if it’s better to confront an ugly and painful truth or to live a dangerous, but in some ways comforting, lie. So my advise is if you want to do it, weave the dream element into the story from the start, drop lots of clues that it's dream, make waking up a goal to be achieved.

One of my favorite aspects is how Devlin plays with some more recognizable zombie horror tropes and blends them nearly seamlessly with psychological horror. You have the Others, the infected, the uninfected, and the survivors, to name a few, each of which means something different to different people, and the meanings aren’t always easy to distinguish because you have to remember who’s using these terms and what experiences they’ve had. If you have read And Then I Woke Up, let me know your thoughts and if you think you’ve figured it out. Horror elements to be sure, but definitely more about the idea what sometimes we mean well, but end up doing horrible things – and how the hell do we deal with that and remain sane? The nitty-gritty: There’s plenty of food for thought in this short horror story that takes the idea of perception and turns it on its head.I’d like to take this time to give special thanks to our Patreon Sponsors who are at the Level 3 reward level and above! Moments of illumination and clarity about the world around both narrator and reader were delivered alongside interaction between the individual who voiced it and characters that appeared offstage.