Grab the Lapels

Awakened by Laura Elliott

I must continue to remind myself that we aren’t dealing with a parasite. Nor are we dealing with a bacterium or a virus. In fact, we know exactly what we’re dealing with, even though we don’t know exactly how it happened or how to begin to fix it. We’re dealing with the Orex Corporation and the company’s revolutionary neural chip. We’re trying to turn it off. The problem is how well it was designed — and Edgar, the professor and I should know, because we’re the ones who designed it.

Laura Elliot’s debut novel, Awakened, does not unroll chronologically. We read Thea’s diary in which she explains current concerns and how she was part of the London team that, in the year 2052, developed a neural chip that would remove the need for sleep. It doesn’t go well when subjects develop muscle mass rapidly and become mindlessly aggressive, causing them to kill people who are not chipped. Thea and a small gang of folks –a few scientists, guards, etc. — live in a tower eleven years after the no-sleep chip was implanted in wealthy people who could afford it. People who wanted more success they could accomplish if they weren’t sleeping. Already, Elliot raises class questions when the neural-chipped rich attack and bite the lower classes that couldn’t afford a voluntary surgery.

Later, a strange man and woman show up outside the tower, yet the people in the tower had thought the rest of the world either dead or chipped monsters. The woman doesn’t speak and the man shows signs of being chipped, but he has reason, speech, and control over the common savagery. Could he be the missing link, the cure?

That’s the basic plot of Awakened, but that’s not what it is. The marketing of Elliot’s novel suggests it’s a zombie survival story, but it’s not. The chipped people behave partially like zombies, partially like vampires, and Thea and her colleagues are trying to find a solution, suggesting Elliot borrowed a good deal from Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, a book I highly recommend. Horror readers will likely be disappointed, but non-horror fans would not be convinced to pick up Awakened based on the synopsis and it’s emphasis on creatures.

Are you more into philosophical questions? Elliot asks many through Thea’s eyes. Why do we need to sleep? Do people holed up together for eleven years have a purpose? If our bad decisions mean we can’t be forgiven if we hurt too many people? While Thea is the villain of the story for taking science too far, her objective was to cure her mother, who suffers from post-viral deep fatigue (she doesn’t get out of bed or interact with anyone). Thus, Elliot slips in concerns we have now about long COVID. Which is more tragic, the post-viral victims or the “Sleepless,” as these zombie/vampires are called — was it worth it to try and heal the post-viral despite the catastrophic outcome? Where was the group we all assume exists that puts guardrails on science? The question of guardrails made me think a good deal about AI.

Here is where Elliot asks us what is a person. Is Thea’s mother, who never leaves her bed, a person? What about the man who shows up at the tower who obviously has a chip but can speak and reason? Is he more human or monster? How about “Subject 001,” a “Sleepless” the survivors managed to capture on whom they run tests without his (they use the pronoun “its”) consent? Because the scientists don’t seem to care about consent, are they monsters?

Thea posits that humanity is diverse, and any group that is homogenous is not humanity. Thus, she defends her opinion that the Sleepless can’t be people; they are all the same. When the man who behaves like a human but has a chip arrives, Thea has to rethink if the Sleepless are homogenous, or if she shut her mind out to them when she othered them. Therefore, readers may consider how Awakened asks in what way immigrants, disabled people, and other racial and ethnic groups are othered and labeled homogenous (i.e., not human). In fact, one character in the survivor group uses a wheelchair, and her feeling is that the scientists don’t need to fix her; the world needs accessibility.

You’ll notice I haven’t written much about individual characters yet, simply referring to them as “survivors.” Elliot, perhaps intentionally, keeps her survivor characters rather blank until near the end. Names crop up in Thea’s diary with no context, which makes sense given it is a diary, but fails to create connections with the readers. For most of the book, I only recognized that Maryam used a wheelchair and Dolly complained that things were not the same as pre-apocalypse. Dolly reminded me of the folks during COVID who demanded we not wear masks, open businesses, just be how we were before. Overall, if you want early relationships with the characters, you won’t get it. Somewhat awkwardly, Elliot throws in a few chapters near the end titled “Conversation with” a character’s name. Was this supposed to be part of Thea’s diary?

For the most part, we learn who Thea is after the man who is human/Sleepless arrives and engages with her intimately in exchange for answering her medical questions and tolerating her examinations. He’s practically a philosopher, quoting poetry and seeing right through Thea. You could say Thea feels “seen” in the eyes of the man, too:

Humans are strange. We make these rituals and build them into our lives as though compelled to find meaning in each little thing. We’re eager, always, to remind ourselves that we’re present, that we exist tangibly in the world, perceived and recognized by other people like us. And yet so much of what we consider to be us happens beyond the borders of our bodies.

Horror fans will find Awakened slow and “talky” but people who like a book that makes them pause and think will eat up Elliot’s work, though they will have to tolerate one scene in which Thea is stalked by a Sleepless. Overall, I was reminded of my experience reading Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, a novel several members of my book club loved for the lush writing and intelligent questions about relationships and devotion.

books of winter 🎄❄️⛄

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