Clay McLeod Chapman Reflects On His Latest, "WAKE UP AND OPEN YOUR EYES!" (INTERVIEW)

Earlier this year I spoke to Clay McLeod Chapman about his previous book, “What Kind of Mother,” a gothic tale of grief and the horror it can produce.  It was a spirited chat, despite the dark subject matter, and Chapman is always fun to talk to.  Speaking to him in the same café just weeks after the 2024 election, the vibe was different.  We were in a jovial mood, but in order to discuss his newest work “Wake Up and Open Your Eyes,” you have to talk about the big orange elephant in the room. 

Chapman’s latest is about a virus of demonic possession that infects us through the many screens we surround ourselves with, especially viewers of cable news company “Fax News.”  Yes, “Fax.”  As in “just the fax.” Chapman divides his book into 3 sections, each focusing on the Fairchild family of Richmond, Virginia, and how the virus ravages their lives.  As I sat down once again with Chapman, he told me that besides friends and family, this was the first functional conversation about the book after the election.  While it was written before Trump’s second win, it would still be au courant even if he lost.  It’s worth noting that the book itself is excellent, though Chapman’s latest victory lap comes with a tinge of fear about the future of our country and the world at large.  Tell us about it…

Lowell Greenblatt: The character of Noah left home to start a family in Brooklyn.  At the risk of sounding like a hack, is he essentially your surrogate?

Clay McLeod Chapman: Not to the “T,” but yes.  It’s inevitable.  You just have to cop to it.

LG: Is this a story you always wanted to tell, or were you inspired by the current political landscape?

CMC:  I never wanted to tell this story [Laughs].  The metric thus far has been to put some skin in the game and write about what scares me.  That’s been true to fluctuating degrees ever since I wrote “Whisper Down the Lane.”  One of the things that scares me the most recently has been this kind of ideological dismantling of my family.  I don’t know yet how specific I’ll be able to talk about it, but it seems pretty obvious.  There’s nothing subtle about this book.

LG: Did you mine a significant amount from your family to write the Fairchilds?

CMC: I think there’s a spiritual kinship that varies by degrees.  I’m an only child, raised by a single mom for the majority of my childhood.  In a lot of ways, the framing device, the sort of entry point is something I share a certain familiarity with. But the quartet we meet in the middle section isn’t my immediate family.

LG: That’s surprising since the middle section is about a family with 2 sons and a dog that you explicitly break down.

CMC:  I have two boys who are “Cain and Abel-ing” one another [Laughs].  It’s funny how they bicker.  Everyone I know, including my wife, has siblings and I’m just this weird interloper who’s observing.  It’s fascinating for me to watch siblings grow.  This might be jumping ahead, but when I was pitching the book, I wanted to focus on the middle section.  That was the book to me.  It’s what I wanted to do.  My editors wanted me to crack the story open a little more and give it a global view.  I came up with the idea that Noah was the way into the story, which is sort of the preamble to the shit hitting the fan in the third section.  The only parts of the apocalypse stories I love are the first hundred pages or the first thirty minutes. 

LG:  Like the opening sequence of the “Dawn of the Dead” remake.

CMC:  Yeah! The first hundred pages of “The Stand” is watching the disease spread.  As soon as humanity has to rebuild, I get bored.  It just doesn’t interest me in a way.  I love when systems are breaking down, and there’s not enough time to think it through, so everyone is panicking.  I really liked “28 Days Later,” but give me the first 28 minutes where nobody’s in control and nobody knows what’s going on.  I had this other thread of an idea about a virus that has a sort of scisming effect, which dovetailed into a lot of writing in the book.

LG:  The anthological structure fascinates me.  The beginning feels like “The Evil Dead,” then you shift into what feels like a haunted house story, and finally a George A Romero adaptation of “The Road.” How did you decide to break the story in that way?

CMC:  [Laughs] I love it.  “Evil Dead” is spot on. I wanted to politicize “Evil Dead.”  

LG: “Join us,” and all that?

CMC: Yeah! I love “Evil Dead 2.”  It’s one of my movies.  It’s a fundamental text, but for the longest time, I was completely naive to the fact that it’s a demonic possession movie.  I have this binary way of thinking where when I consider possession films, I think of films like “The Exorcist.”

LG: The iconography of the demons and the chainsaw don’t match with other possession films.  The first 2 “Evil Dead” films are practically action films.

CMC: And just the abuse that the body takes when it’s possessed.  I’m not a huge fan of the remakes, though I really do appreciate “Evil Dead Rise.”  But there’s something to be said of the genetic vibe of possession.  The pure anarchy of it.  Like you feel like a drop of blood is the conveyance, and there’s no way to contain it.  The “Evil Dead” movies are bleak and nihilistic in their humor.  You just want to root for Ash, but there’s no hope.  They begin and end on a note of chaos, and I wanted to try that.

Despite the dark subject matter, Chapman gives a lively reading wherever he goes.

LG: Speaking of humor, I was surprised how funny it was, even as the world was going to shit.

CMC:  I have to own it, because I wrote it, but you have to laugh!  You just have to laugh through the sheer audacity.  Not to cast judgement or steer into climate change, but if the world is gonna burn, I see it as January 6th. Like, wanting a candidate who’s going to be a molotov cocktail because the systems don’t work anymore.  To me, that’s galling in so many ways, but you just have to laugh.  Rome is burning and you just gotta dance.

LG:  There’s an implicit condemnation of conservatives, but you don’t let liberals off the hook, either.  Noah isn’t some genius you expect to save the day.  Can you talk about walking that line?

CMC:  To be fair and balanced-

LG:  I see what you did there.

CMC: [Laughs]  There’s like this level of culpability that I don’t know if I’m ready to feel responsible for.  What terrifies me is that the morning after the 2016 election, everyone in my neighborhood was in a daze.  The day after the 2024 election, there was a sense of “fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice…”

LG:  Like history repeating itself?

CMC: Like nobody saw this coming.  I know for me, there was this ramp of hope that was dashed pretty quickly.  There’s hope that our systems will remain intact and goodness, decency and morality will prevail, and yet, they won’t [Laughs].  For me, rather than assigning blame or saying “this half of the country is at fault,” you have to start looking inward.  Like, regardless of margins and the popular vote, “how did I not see this coming?”  I’m living in this sheltered existence, and this softening makes me think I’m not gonna be ready when the world starts burning.  It’s just as much Noah’s fault for where the world is.  

I’m gonna take so many licks for this book.  Everyone’s gonna be so quick to think it’s a screed against right-wing politics, and there’s no denying it’s in there, but I feel like that’s a limited way of thinking of it.  There’s a certain dimension of both sides.  That’s why demonic possession is so much fun [Laughs].  It’s an easier message.

LG:  You don’t just take aim at conservative news.  The possession takes several forms across all our screens from influencer culture, to online forums, and even a cartoon on a child’s iPad.  How did you connect those seemingly-disparate sources together?

CMC:  To be honest, every book [I write] has different origins.  I remember reading a lot about recruitment videos for Al Qaeda.  TikTok and Facebook were being used as recruitment tools for terrorist cells.  It was rare, but there was a lot of pearl-clutching when some young suburban white woman was radicalized.  To me, that was so fascinating, because on some level, regardless of where these radicalizations came from, there was always a moment where the common refrain from family members was that they weren’t like themselves anymore.  They were possessed.  You could start listing instances that were said about someone.  It was never one thing.  It was never just Fox News, or just Facebook.  I’ve had family members caught up in the wellness craze that existed before Goop.  There’s a mistrust in conventional medicine, where people leap over doctors into untested, unregulated [medicine].  To me, that was alarming, because it was all coming from Facebook ads and memes.  It’s like a sinkhole.  From doing the deep dive, it’s like wellness culture leads to right-wing extremism.  It’s so apparent.  There’s like a digital paper trail to maneuver.  It’s easy for an outside observer to see it, but if you’re caught in that rabbit hole, it’s terrifying, because you’re just not aware of it.  

It makes me think “what’s going to be MY rabbit hole?”  I’m gonna get old and technology is gonna advance and I’m not gonna be able to understand how to turn on my Google Glass, or brain chip, or whatever it is.  I’ll be a target for whatever kind of methodology, or scam.  Something like deepfakes. I have to be more savvy. More aware of what I’m imbibing. The older we get, the more things you just don’t see coming that’ll just suck you dry.

LG:  Well, you’re clearly ahead of the game.  The people who fall prey to it, like you said, are just in it and have no idea.  I also wasn’t aware of the link between health influencers and right-wing propaganda until recently.  You’d think they would be at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

CMC:  Isn’t that amazing?  That’s the thing.  We’ve gone beyond “rightwingers feel THIS way and leftwingers feel THAT way.”  There’s a blending of things you would attribute to a more liberal mindset that are in fact, dovetailing and coalescing to rightwing, extreme ideologies.  It’s not binary anymore. There are these weird permutations.  

I’ll make this blanket statement about the third part of the book, where there’s no one true source, like “the devil did it.” No “man behind the curtain.”  I’m already sensing some frustration because people want to know [what’s causing it].  You can’t turn to social media.  Even source information is so tangled now, you can’t say “I found it at the smoking gun at this link!” [Laughs]. There’s no culprit because the din is so loud. Whether people think it’s demonic, or viral, we’re even beyond the truth.  Even if the culprit was in the text, like “here it is on page 231,” you wouldn’t know it, because it’s drowned out. With all the Monday morning quarterbacking, the fact that we’re even in a place where we want to know “why,” it’s like we’re neck-deep in the shit.

LG: That’s incredibly bleak, so let’s lighten things up by going back to George A. Romero. I assume you’re a fan.

CMC:  [Laughs] Well, “Night of the Living Dead” is phenomenal because we don’t know the rules yet.  I love “Dawn of the Dead” because it’s just rebuilding.  It’s structured like the day after “night one,” so our first step is to go to the mall.  They last a while, but it still feels fresh.  With “Day of the Dead,” I start to lose interest.  It’s just too bleak. Then with “Land of the Dead,” I’m bored, because you’re just waiting for them to rebuild the systems.  

“The Road” is one of my favorite [books].  It affected me profoundly.  It’s interesting because you have this narrative of characters encountering other characters, like cameos.  They’re compelling cross-sections of humanity.  Maybe you can hang around, or not, but you don’t stay with them at the end of the day.

Chapman, awake with open eyes.

Interview edited for length and clarity.  For more on Clay MacLeod Chapman, check out his website.  He will be hosting a screening of “Evil Dead 2” in Brooklyn, New York on January 21st along with the Brooklyn Horror Society and The Twisted Spine. “Wake Up and Open Your Eyes” releases January 7, 2025 where books are sold.

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