‘Wake Up and Open Your Eyes’ Author Clay McLeod Chapman on Facing America’s Demons
Through novels like Whisper Down the Lane, Ghost Eaters, and What Kind of Mother, Clay McLeod Chapman has become one of horror’s most important contemporary voices, a deft explorer of grief, madness, and fear in the darkest corners of American life.
Chapman’s novels have explored everything from urban legends and drug culture to the loss of a child to Satanic Panic, but with Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, he may have found his most ambitious subject yet. The new novel, out now, follows the Fairchild family in the midst of an America experiencing a strange and demonic new awakening, a mass-possession driven by some very familiar media addictions.
Ahead of the book’s release, Chapman sat down with Dread Central to discuss the book’s influences, ambitions, and what he hopes readers find in this dark journey into some very literal, particularly American, demons.
Dread Central: I can easily see this book coming from thinking a lot about the state of American media, or the state of the attention economy. I can also imagine it coming from just thinking “What if all this stuff we’re addicted to really is just demons?” So, how did Wake Up and Open Your Eyes start for you?
Clay McLeod Chapman: Whenever I’m writing these books, it’s never one clear, succinct spot, but it’s kind of like a multitude of different angles, and I feel like this one had two, if not three different kinds of apertures into my imagination.
First and foremost, to be completely frank, over the last say eight, 10 years, I’ve bared witness to certain members of my own family gravitating more towards conservative media, to the extent where it has caused a certain kind of ideological rift that makes holiday dinners all the more interesting. And I know I’m not alone in that, I know that other people have experienced similar things, and in imbibing a lot of media that speaks specifically to that. I came across a couple… I think there was a reference at some point where someone said something to the effect of, “It’s like my parents are possessed,” and I just remember being like, “Oh, that’s it, demons.”
It’s such an over-simplification of something so complex, and yet it feels so fun to articulate this kind of cultural shift in the way that we take in our news and take in information, and just put that metaphorical sugar-coating of demons over it.
So, yeah, there was that, and then the other thing, which is a lot shorter and simpler, is I was really obsessed with this notion of teens being indoctrinated into terrorist cells by way of their social media. That young teen girls were succumbing to ISIS or were finding their way into the darker recesses of social media by way of apertures in Facebook, apertures in Instagram, and that it leads to the furthest regions of the world. So, you’d have these suburban girls in the Midwest suddenly buying tickets to Pakistan, or other corners of the world, Afghanistan and China, find their way in, and I just thought that was fascinating.
DC: You could take that possession metaphor and apply it to just about any kind of media in one way or another, but you branch this story out into a specific set of media influences. How did you build your demonic network?
CMC: I think conservative news media is… the lowest hanging fruit on a larger tree of influence, of persuasive forces. Doing Fox News is almost too easy, that’s the kind of devil we know, and it’s easy to lampoon it, easy to focus on it because it’s right there. And I think for anyone who pays attention or goes a step or two further, you find these far more nefarious elements to influence the culture. It’s diabolical, it’s terrifying. To the extent that I find myself succumbing to memes, or links, or things that I find on social media. [Sometimes] you just have to pause and say, “Wait a minute, what am I imbibing? What is this? And what’s the intent behind it?” That just scares the living shit out of me.
DC: We’re talking a lot about concept, but I also want to talk about character. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes goes a lot of places, but it’s focused largely on two branches of one family. You have Noah, this guy who is the “reasonable person” going around wondering what the hell is happening. Then you have Asher (his brother) and Asher’s wife and children, and you document the ways in which they succumb to these dark forces. Which part of that was more challenging for you?
CMC: Well, two things. I will come clean and confess that writing Noah was purely my opportunity to take myself and my own political inclinations to task. It’s not a one-to-one correlative, but in effect, Noah is me. I am entering into my middle-age-ness, in my liberal enclave here in this coastal elite city, [with] all of my privileges. If I was going to write this book, I needed to take myself to task just as much as anyone else. So, frankly, Noah is all of my own self-loathing for what I see in myself, just kind of on the page. If there is a demonic apocalypse, anyone with liberal tendencies is just going to be shit out of luck because I just feel as if I have become so soft-skinned and passive in my own intake that I’m so fucked. And I just wanted to be honest about that.
But the other thing I want to say is that, in pitching this book, for me, the core to it was the quartet, the Fairchild four: Asher’s family. There is a version of this book where it would’ve been nothing but just living hermetically sealed within that house, with that family, and watching them undergo this methodical, demonic possession. They start off as this picture-perfect family, suburban family, and they ultimately become these slathering, drooling, demonically possessed monsters that go out into the world and wreak havoc. But my editors were very kind of vocal about “What is the macro version of this story? What’s happening in the rest of the world?” So I had to crack it open a little bit, a lot, in order to encompass what was happening in the house next door, the house across the street.
DC: You talked about your own liberal softness, but there is a sense in reading this book that you really went down some rabbit holes into a lot of dark stuff. What was the process like of immersing yourself in that darkness, and are you OK?
CMC: Well, the jury’s out whether I’m OK. I think now that readers are going to get the book, I’m bracing myself for that experience. I feel like if you’re going to write a book like this, you can’t pull your punches. And a lot of that really goes to The Exorcist and Evil Dead.
For me, The Exorcist was over 50 years ago, and if you think about it, that movie had, what, a 12-year-old girl masturbating with a crucifix, and forcing the face of her own mother into her bleeding groin. That movie was so traumatic, and that was 50 years ago. And I feel like I couldn’t in clear conscience not amp it up—Wake Up and Open Your Eyes had to go to these [dark places]. I think the film that really holds the torch is Evil Dead, because Evil Dead is nothing but chaos. I find the Evil Dead movies, particularly the remakes, to be very hopeless.
But I love that about them. There’s no surviving, we all will succumb to this possession. So, I think I just wanted to follow that. But yeah, am I OK? No, I’ve listened to “Baby Shark,” as a parent, a million times, and you feel like the Manchurian Candidate. It is taking over, it is slipping into your system. Algorithms, YouTube algorithms, and wellness culture, it’s all there for us to imbibe. I wanted that to all exist in one book in order to point to: These are the apertures, these are the cracks in the wall, these are the chinks in the armor that really allow the demons in.
DC: Well, speaking of the demons, we just talked about The Exorcist and Evil Dead, and in the acknowledgments of this book you shout out a bunch of different books that influenced your take. Did you map out your own demon lore in any way, or did it flow instinctually?
CMC: I would definitely say it flowed, but what’s phenomenal about demonic possession is that you could just list off all of the categories or facets, the stages of demonic possession, and then if you did that, and then right next to it you just write Fox News, or wellness culture, and then it’s like almost beat for beat. You can see how someone would succumb to that specific indoctrination, whether it’s wellness culture, whether it’s 24-hour news networks, whether it’s an earworm like “Baby Shark.” They exist in this way that the succumbing to it mirrors demonic possession so cleanly, that I will be frank, and I will confess that it wasn’t some Herculean effort to draw comparisons.
Demonic possession was the scaffolding, the framework for everything else to fall into place. In the most spirited, mad lib way, erase possession and put in Fox News, or put in wellness culture, and all of a sudden it follows suit. But instead of being possessed by a demon, instead of being possessed by Pazuzu, I’m being possessed by Gwyneth Paltrow. And it works.
DC: Speaking a little bit more about influences, what are some of your favorite demonic possession novels?
CMC: We all have to shout out Paul Tremblay with A Head Full of Ghosts because frankly, I feel like that’s the most interesting story about it. And it was so exciting and so frustrating to read [Josh Malerman’s] Incidents Around the House. I had written a draft, maybe I was on the second draft, and I read it and I was like, “Fuck, fuck… That book just did it.” It was such an original take on possession. I loved it. It’s going to be so hard to beat that book. No one should even try, frankly.
Come Closer by Sara Gran, I think that book, honestly, was such a guiding light. There’s no holding a candle to it, but my best attempt at replicating what Sara Gran does in Come Closer is still light years away from what she did in that book. Maybe the only other one I want to mention, because I think it’s so compelling, is the Pontypool series. It’s not possession per se, it’s more in this zombie lore.
DC: It has that infectious media angle to it, which is brilliant.
CMC: Yeah. I feel like reading the original trilogy of books, reading the play, and seeing the movie, I love that the story itself is so malleable that it breaks out of any one given medium. You could watch the movie, you could read the novel, you could go see the play, and they all have their own very engaging way of telling that specific story.
DC: That’s an interesting point that makes me think about your wider range of work. You’ve worked in the theater, you’ve written plays, you’ve written audio dramas, you’ve written screenplays. What does all of that other work give you for something like Wake Up and Open Your Eyes?
CMC: I am always focused on storytelling as a function, and I think that goes back to something like Edgar Allan Poe, where you have a first-person narrative, where the narrator of the story is in effect speaking directly to you, the reader, to the extent that when I read it, I think of it as theater. If you were to read “The Tell-Tale Heart” out loud, it comes alive. It activates itself in such a way that… It’s shake-and-bake theater, it’s a monologue. And I’ve been obsessed with that notion, that idea that these are stories, these are novels, these exist on the page, but there’s this ability to activate them in such a way that it becomes something more.
There’s something very conscious about that. But different perspectives, first person to second person to third person, it feels like this fractured way of telling a story, but every so often, these voices… It’s always a voice coming at you. Storytelling has to be active to the extent that it almost has to feel like an attack on the reader’s senses. So, yeah, that’s my half-assed way of saying that I think this is Poe’s fault.
DC: You mentioned the personal angle and inspirations of this, with your family, and a lot of us have similar stories. Did writing Wake Up and Open Your Eyes change your perspective on the other side of the ideological aisle? It’s a little more complicated than that, but how did it affect your perspective on the kind of people who might be susceptible to these forces that you’re writing about?
CMC: I will say that the writing of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes wasn’t as cathartic as I would hope. If anything, I feel as if I’ve painted myself into a corner, and I’m scared now because I had to tell my folks, “Don’t read this one, guys, you can skip this one.” I don’t think it’s a hopeful book, and there was no catharsis, there was no release. If anything, it was just me screaming into the void in hopes that other people could scream back. Across the void maybe there’s someone else out there who feels the same way that I do, and that would offer some sort of relief.
But writing with empathy was difficult, and I think that the thing that I want to express, which might sound like an excuse, or be defensive. It’s not even so much that it’s like, “Those people over there are reacting this way and therefore I am taking them to task.” For me, it’s kind of like “We’re all in this shit together.” Maybe the empathy is that it’s not like the right versus the left, as much as it is the story has the aperture of chastising the right, but then it becomes the snake biting its own tail, and collapses back in on itself to chastise people on the other end of the political spectrum, and say, “We’re all fucked.”
DC: I’m tempted to end the interview with “We’re all fucked,” but with all that in mind, what are you hoping readers get from Wake Up and Open Your Eyes?
CMC: I really want to answer sincerely, because I feel like it’s easy to be glib. What I find most eye-opening is that life is happening at such a clip right now. The era we are now entering is so new and so uncharted that nobody knows. Anyone can take a guess or forecast, but every day is leading us towards some greater unknowing, and that abyss just feels massive. It’s a time when community and finding people that you feel at home with, and safe with, is really important.
For me, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is… I guess I just wanted to take part in the conversation. It’s insane to think that this is the conversation happening at the moment because nobody knows. That’s my takeaway: nobody knows what the fuck is going on, or what’s going to happen tomorrow versus the next day, versus next week. This book posits that it’s madness. It’s absolute lunacy. And yeah, the tongue is pressed so far into the cheek, that it bursts out the other side. But that’s what horror does, right?
Wake Up And Open Your Eyes is available January 7th wherever books are sold.
Categorized:Interviews
