A review by gabrielleint
And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

5.0

I’m rating this on a novella scale, so please understand this is not the same five stars I give to more full length books. But I found this to be pretty much the perfect psychological thriller novella. There was such a full and embodied world pretty much right from the beginning of the book, a full and embodied world that relies on our knowledge of the very “comfort stories” and “narratives” the infected use to fuel their delusions in the book. The way you constantly can’t know if you should trust who is currently narrating and the person currently narrating is telling you that is so fun and really makes you think about how we conceptualize sincerity and reality. This book feels like getting punched but in a good way. It’s like a battering of your consciousness. And, yes, it is good in that kind of annoying existentialist way, but that’s why it gets the novella five stars because I’m partially rewarding this author for knowing that trying to make this a full length book or god forbid a series would cheapen the message of the book and would make it dumb and bad.