And Then I Woke Up Commentary

SPOILERS AHEAD

“It was a Saturday when the world finally broke.” But this is not your typical end-of-the-world story.

What would happen if, suddenly, a large swath of the population saw something that wasn’t there, something that makes them afraid enough to turn to violence deemed necessary? Well, things would get violent. And, in the wake of violence, the “world” would feel like it’s ending.

In And Then I Woke Up, we meet Lewis Spence, our protagonist, at Ironside, an old school building converted into a sort of sanatorium/shelter for those recovering from a mysterious illness that turns people into monsters… Or does it? The disease affects one’s ability to perceive reality, reflecting a contemporary confusion regarding facts and alternative facts, though blown up to a frightening scale. Spence befriends another of the “cured”: Leila, who wants to escape the facility to find someone from her past. Together, they explore a changed world— an apocalyptic landscape where groups of “infected” roam in packs— violent packs. The infected believe that people like Spence and Leila are actually the ones infected, whereas they are seeing reality correctly. In the infected’s minds, everything is a threat. In the cured’s minds, only the infected are a threat now.

As Spence and Leila seek out Leila’s friend, they share their horror stories from the end of the world, when they did horrible things to survive. At Ironside, they are granted mercy for their crimes and afforded opportunities to reconcile with those they have harmed. Out in the world, Spence goes on his own voyage of forgiveness. Out there, he grapples with the subjectivity of truth, the slipperiness of “the narrative” the infected must unlearn in order to be cured, and the trippy experience of waking up both from sleep and from the infected reality.

If you’re anything like me, you may have read the title and thought this is a story that ends with “and then I woke up.” Well, you don’t have to worry; without spoiling it, you needn’t fret over the boring, cliche ending you may expect coming. In fact, don’t expect anything— the story will have you questioning it all.

And Then I Woke Up is about the relativity of truth, distrust of “others”, the kind of violence we are willing to accept, the lengths people will go to survive, and the lengths people will go to ignore reality. Devlin plays with scary imagery to evoke the terror in not being able to fully trust your own perception.

I don’t want to spoil the reading experience by divulging the full context of the book. It’s not that there are many big spoilers, but, rather, the experience here is important. Like a funhouse, you have to go through it to encounter each new revelation, pulling back the curtain inch-by-inch until the truth becomes just barely visible.

The story is really about the cruelty people are capable of under the right circumstances. It’s about the narratives we tell ourselves to convince us that we’re justified, and, in this case, it’s justification for murder and violence. That violence is enflamed by the huge gully set between the infected vs the uninflected/cured— a gully of both knowledge and connection. Whatever powers that be in the new social order keep the two groups apart, one of the “Compassion Directives” in place to keep the peace. Both sides judge one another, and, in some cases, are very wrong. They mingle here and there, but, after the collapse of everything, they keep to themselves.

The story makes us confront all that we ignore day-to-day, how much we don’t see. How much we don’t want to see. In a world that is obsessed with its own collapse, where more and more people stockpile food and weapons to prepare for the coming end times, the question becomes: How eager are we for the end of the world? Do we secretly want it to come? And therefore see our demise in everything around us? If so, then is it really there? Who’s to say?

In the end, this book will have you thinking well after you flipped the last page.