I spent a couple decades working as a picture framer, which definitely affected my appreciation and enjoyment of art. People largely frame things that are important to them because custom framing is produced almost entirely by American labor and, as a result, is pretty expensive. (I’m not talking about a frame you get at Target and stuff a photo in, but something designed, cut, and assembled specifically for the piece.) So as a custom framer you see a lot of family photos, diplomas or wedding certificates, tourist art, marathon posters, or memorabilia that reminds the customer of some event or place.
When I would frame art art though — by which I mean paintings, drawings, or prints — that stuff often ended up being way less personal. People often chose art that completed an interior design, or because it fit the space, or because it conveyed some sense of culture. I can’t tell you how many posters I framed from a Monet exhibit in Chicago. Dozens, certainly.All of this is winding up to say that, after the grillionth Georgia O’Keefe or Ducks Unlimited painting, I got kinda tired of representational art. (I’m not bagging on representational art; art should be taken on its own merits and not as a class.) But I started gravitating to abstract art. I really dug how abstraction could comment on the concept of form, color, and expression. Like the shit Rothko can do with a bright red square is sublime.
Which brings me somewhat long-windedly to Awakened by Laura Elliott. I read a lot of zombie and zombie-adjacent books. If it’s got even tangentially related undead or otherwise insensate creatures, I’m all in. While I can find enjoyment in the usual zombie outbreak run-and-scream narrative, I’ve read so many of them that I can get a little antsy reading one. And similarly to my experience with framing a lot of representational art, I have begun to really appreciate the oddball or leftwise take on the shambling horde. Awakened is very much a leftwise take on the zombie narrative, and, as such, should have been right up my alley.
Thea Chares lives in the Tower of London with a skeleton crew of medical staff, engineers, and a couple other folk, people who were instrumental in developing a neural implant that would eliminate a person’s need for sleep. After the neural chip was widely adopted, something catastrophic happened with the programming of the chip, a shift which basically turned everyone into ravening monsters. (Lo, arguing taxonomy of imaginary creatures is a losing proposition, but I’d say the Sleepless — as they are called — are most like the creatures in the OG I am Legend by Richard Matheson. Which is to say, zombie-like in ways, but vampire-like in others.) Thea and her band of survivors while away their time trapped in the Tower half-assedly trying to come up with a cure and in-fighting, a tenuous status quo that is unsettled when they take in two survivors: a pregnant human woman, and a preternaturally self-composed one of the Sleepless.
The plot of the novel, insofar as there is one, is pretty episodic. Awakened is laid out in an almost epistolary format, narrated by Thea. There are also what feels like dream fragments interspersed throughout the text, something which is obviously thematically relevant, but that eventually felt kinda tiresome (wocka wocka). Thea comments on her current situation and muses on the specific experiences and attributes that eventually culminated in her functionally bringing on the apocalypse.
The prose regularly brought me up short with how well done it was. Like I kind of want to give a wedgie to people who say things like this, but: Elliott writes beautiful sentences. Thea’s reasons for creating the implant have roots in her mother’s chronic fatigue syndrome, how her mother’s chronic condition was both devastating but dismissed by just about everyone, up to and including the medical establishment. Maybe especially that last. Here’s one of the many highlights I made while I was reading:
It was my first introduction, embryonic, into a knowledge I was too young to articulate — that a patient’s sanity could conveniently end at the same point a doctor’s medical knowledge ran out.
I mean, just sit with that for a moment. I can think of dozens of instances in my own life and countless in the lives of others where I was dismissed or treated as some sort of malingerer because the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. (“If I don’t know what it is, it isn’t”) The book is chock full of incisive little moments like this, especially when Thea gets going on post-viral illness and the like. One of my less well written notes reads, “This is a Covid book,” which is obv super reductive, but also isn’t wrong. This dovetails pretty neatly into my pet theory that zombie stories, especially those written before the pandemic, somehow manage to map pretty perfectly onto the experience of lockdown and early Covidtimes. The sense of being trapped, a affliction cycling in the population out there maps pretty easily to the experience of being in lockdown.
One of my other pet theories about zombie narratives is that there are two kinds: the siege, or the roadtrip. Both make commentary on the construction of society, one by recreating it in miniature, and the other by getting the lay of the land and its people. Awakened is obviously the first, with some added freight in that Thea and her band are the cause of the devastation outside the wall. The choice of the Tower as the setting felt laden with meaning too. It’s a symbol of Englishness in a fundamental way, down to the likely Victorian-invented myth that if the resident ravens were to leave the Tower of London, England would fall. There’s a Ravenmaster on the government payroll to this day to keep that eventuality at bay. This makes me think Elliott is very deliberately saying something about Britain (or England, though I’m not sure the distinction would matter).
I’m currently sitting in a country that is slitting its own throat, so I understand a little better Britain’s unraveling, starting with Brexit. I see Thea and her band as people who have not sat with and owned the evil they’ve done to the world, and it is clear they have done horrific damage. But of course they saw, and continue to see, themselves as humanity’s saviors. Set this up against Labour’s recent heel-turn, and this feels pretty fucking relevant. Or consider the DOGE bro in his 20s who will be responsible for millions of deaths more than the hundreds of thousands he’s already caused due to his dismantling of USAID. I’m sure he sleeps like a baby, because acknowledging that level of moral injury has got to be impossible. Even if everything at USAID were to be put back tomorrow — even if Thea and her people find a cure — that doesn’t abrogate their responsibility to the dead and dying.
I see the way the novel critiques their techbro attitude towards the people they’ve literally dehumanized — especially embodied in the Vladimir character — and the ways their moated society is ultimately untenable. The ringleader of the development of the chip is called the Anonymous Billionaire, for example, which makes me arch my back and hiss, but I get that many people have fallen for the Great Man rhetoric that clouds around the ultra-wealthy like a poison gas. (That has begun to change, but it’s always easier to treat fucking morons like Elon Musk as the exception rather the rule.) But the critique felt muddied or muted, partially because I legit had a hard time understanding, in concrete terms, what happened at the end. Nothing good, I’m sure, but the actions swerved metaphorical in ways I just couldn’t follow.
Like I don’t understand the decision to have the neural implant result in morphological changes to the human body: the Sleepless apparently have rows and rows of shark teeth, in addition to Fremen-blue eyes and other changes. I won’t ding the novel for this infelicity — how does a neural implant result in shark teeth? — because clearly, clearly the novel isn’t some scientifically accurate wankfest. (Don’t criticize The Road because it isn’t possible to have all life, down to the bacterial, die but humans still survive; that’s horrifically missing the point.) So then I have to contend with these morphological changes as a thematic element. Thea and Vladimir — the sentient Sleepless character — have a lot of conversations about the nature of humanity. I think that one of the themes of Awakened is similar to the aforementioned I Am Legend: that humanity is the monster! I’m not in love with the way this plays out in Awakened.
I started this essay chatting about my experience with art, how my appreciation of any given genre’s quirks and tropes evolves as I have more experience and understanding of the genre. For sure Awakened isn’t an outbreak narrative like Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead. There’s a single sequence with one of the more feral Sleepless (one that is somewhat confusingly blocked). The vibe is much more musing literary take on humanity’s propensity to act inhumanely. That is cool, and I can dig it. Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve encountered this theme before, and a lot, but more cleanly and clearly expressed. I guess what I’m trying to say that I suspect that the things I don’t love about Awakened are more specific to me, and not a general condition. There is a lot of good stuff in Awakened, and I’m glad I read it, I just think because of my background in the genre, I maybe got in my own way.
I received my copy from Netgalley. Awakened is out now.