Have You Read This? And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

 

We trust reality. Or at least we hope reality will always be reliable, that the same rules that governed it yesterday will govern it today and so on. It can be quite upsetting when the little daily bargain you make with reality is suddenly broken. Honestly, if you can’t trust reality, who or what can you trust? That question is what drives this zombie-adjacent novella And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin.

This story is about monsters and about survivors. After a plague that turns ordinary people into monsters strikes, bands of survivors roam the countryside, stealing what they can and taking out any monsters they come across. These monsters might have been friends, neighbors, lovers, or family, but they are no longer human. Spence learned all these hard lessons as a survivor and he’s killed many monsters, but the plague might be something different and he might also have a different kind of body count on his hands.

Devlin’s book is a quick read, but it’s not necessarily an easy one. This is largely because of how it consistently erodes the trustworthiness of its narrator Spence. Spence’s story might not be what he thinks it is, meaning the reader will start to question what exactly is real in Devlin’s book. About the only answer Devlin gives is that reality is ultimately subjective, but this realization is of little comfort to poor Spence. Fans of shorter works like Sara Tantlinger’s To Be Devoured and Joe Koch’s The Wingspan of Severed Hands should like this particular break from reality.