I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

Thanks to Angry Robot and NetGalley for the arc 🤍

Gonna be honest I don’t think I could even follow this enough to really say much about it. There were some neuralchips (?) implanted in brains to lessen the need for sleep but ofc that back fired because they weren’t smart enough to put in a fail safe?? Then somehow they turned into vampires? Zombies? Maybe vampire zombies? The whole thing dragged. It felt like nothing was happening and it just was not progressing along.

The goat scene was wild. The weird “romance” with Alex but then also like an emotional affair with Vlad? Idk the whole thing was one really long, sleep deprived ramble that didn’t always seem to be coherent.

From the blurb, I knew I was going to enjoy this novel. A tech-fuelled zombie apocalypse? Yes please!
Elliott delivers with plenty of creepiness and dread, and I was hooked from the beginning. It reminded me a little (at first) of Nick Cutter's THE TROOP, I think mainly because of the scientific research aspect of it. It very quickly became it's own thing, though.
Although I appreciated the different take on zombies/Sleepless here, I am getting a *little* tired of the trope. That said, I think Elliott told her story well and I'll be looking out for more from her in the future.

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.

"Awakened" by Laura Elliott (Angry Robot, 2025)

A curious novel, and certainly not what I expected at first.

We're in the near future, and a group of scientists have invented a chip that keeps your brain active and eliminates the need for daily sleep. This chip can be manually deactivated, which makes it attractive, especially to exploitative companies. Things get complicated when these chips begin to fail; they can't be deactivated, and humanity falls into a state reminiscent of a cross between vampires and zombies.

In the Tower of London, the scientists who created this device find themselves locked away from what's left of society out there, trying to find a cure. Our protagonist, Thea, initially joined the project with the idea of trying to find a cure for the fibromyalgia her mother has been suffering from for a long time. The guilt of not having found a cure, coupled with the guilt over the consequences of the chip's malfunction, creates a sad character for much of the novel.

Okay, with this starting point, I imagined a dystopian novel. Even a science fiction one with a biological aspect. However, the novel quickly becomes a kind of "Interview with the Vampire" as one of these beings manages to enter the fortress and strike up a conversation, in a manner similar to that, with Thea. This conversation between them about humanity, past lives, guilt, etc., is the common thread throughout this story.

"Awakened" is a somber, sad novel, the kind you read on a good day. And while on the one hand I was very interested in the themes discussed and the reflections on each of them (including the guilt and mistakes of our current society), the lack of a more defined plot, as well as the somewhat abstract ending, left me with a bittersweet taste.

In any case, it seems to me like a novel that, using elements already seen, puts a new twist on some of the genre's stereotypes, which is appreciated.

Funded by an anonymous billionaire, a group of scientists developed a neural chip that would allow the population to “turn off” sleep, resulting in more time for productivity. Soon, everyone had one. Deprived of the necessary rest provided by sleep, people quickly descended into madness and became a population of sleepless nightmares. Marooned in the Tower of London, the surviving scientists work to find a cure for the sleepless, challenged by their own guilt for that they have done, and what they must still do.

Awakened has less action than I expected (I was expecting something with much more of a zombie-horror-survival vibe) but it was pretty gripping nonetheless. The plot is driven by introspection, moral questioning and personal motivation, rather than zombie attacks or post-apocalyptic survival.

The story is focussed entirely on events inside the Tower, and I think it would have been interesting for the story to have expanded more into what was going on outside those walls. There’s certainly a space for more books exploring this sleepless world.

The only aspect of this book that really bothered me was the author’s insertion of her own experience into the story. I understand that her experience with post-viral illness is the inspiration behind this novel, but her viewpoint was really hammered in, in a way that I felt didn’t always truly work with the story.

When I first read the synopsis of this book, it terrified me as someone who has struggled with sleep issues at times. And honestly, I did stay up reading this one during the night, but for all the best reasons. It was a good read, fast paced and kept me interested. I love dystopian and sci-fi books and this one definitely hit the spot.

Awakened by Laura Elliott is a gripping and haunting tale of a world where sleep has been stolen and horror unleashed. The story’s tension and vivid worldbuilding kept me hooked from start to finish. I really enjoyed this book and rated it five stars.

A group of scientists are invited by a billionaire to develop a revolutionary technology. This involved creating a chip, which, when implanted in a brain removed the need for sleep. Sounds great, right? Increased productivity, more time to do things ones loves, etc……But it didn't work like that. Instead, it affected people's ability to remember, made them angry, and eventually, turned them into bitey monsters.

Civilization fell, and now a small group of scientists, living in the Tower of London, research and try to find a cure.

Main character Thea got involved with the initial chip creation project because she was trying to find a cure for her mother's fibromyalgia. She now spends her time feeling guilty, and assisting with examinations or autopsies, if a feral subject is procured. And having ethical arguments with some of her fellow scientists.

Then, one of the ferals (i.e., zombies) walks in, with a pregnant feral woman, and he's still got his wits about him. His name is Vladimir, and over several conversations, Thea gets to know him and is captivated, and really begins to question all that she and the others have done.

Though there is a plot, this is more of piece questioning some of the premises that underpin society: is it right to only look toward progress? What are the ethics of developing technology? What is the greater good?

The writing is good, with author Laura Elliott evoking such a tense and frightening atmosphere, all while creating an introspective novel. Much as I appreciated this book, I sometimes got a little lost in Thea's reminiscences and questioning, and never really felt like the author fully answered a few of the questions I had about Vladimir.

Otherwise, this is a terrific debut.

The audio is good, with voice actor Antonia Beamish inhabiting Thea and Vladimir beautifully, as well as the fussy, lead scientist.

Thank you to Netgalley, Angry Robot and to Dreamscape Media for these ARCs in exchange for my review.

‘What, then, is the body but a vessel for the mind? Is it right that we should be limited by it? Is it not monstrous to constrain ourselves when there might be another way?’

In this surreal and grotesque, conflict-driven literary debut (my mind is boggled by that – how can this be a debut?!), the epistolary novel meets dystopian vampire Body Horror.

Swinging between points on a timeline (with the principal events 40-odd years from now), Laura Elliott brings civilisation to its knees, asking ‘[where] does the difference between nature and science lie?’ Elliott’s trope is rest: a character battling doctors’ misconceptions of M. E. (the protagonist’s mother) is the premise whereby Elliott investigates the impact of mutations of natural rest cycles and the consequences of alchemising such.

‘Awakened’ is a deeply personal account from an author with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis of how the medical industry turns people into monsters when clinicians sever themselves from patient experience:

‘There was little dignity in suffering, but even less in suffering that was doubted. My mother suffered, and she suffered more so because there was a question mark hanging like the sword of Damocles over the legitimacy of her plight. The doubt of doctors was a poison to her efforts to survive. Every appointment became a battleground when it should have been a relief. The effort to become well again was blocked by the very people who were meant to help her. When doctors don’t believe you, who else can you turn to for help?’

The author situates Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as provocation for her vivid and discomfiting exploration of sleep as poison; of tiredness, exhaustion, fatigue, as corruptions of the ideal state of being (‘Sleep, those little slices of death, carving out ever-greater chunks of life’), and of how science, in its attempt to resolve this disproportion in the near future, destroys humanity.

Quite brilliantly, Elliott detonates this premise and propels readers into a horrific dystopia where the antithesis – sleeplessness – science’s misguided remedy to the ‘astonishing force’ of sleep and rest, has become the paradigm of monstrosity:

“Is what is natural the same as what is good? Is divergence from a norm unnatural […]?”
[…]
“Tell me, Doctor Chares, where do you draw the line between unnatural science and nature’s monstrosity? How far would you step over it to survive?”

As readers, we are used to the concept of vampires sleeping during the day and being ‘awakened’ at night, inverting the natural rhythms of our human bodies (one of the reasons we can assign them their place in Horror – they are ‘other’ than the ‘norm’, as Vlad puts it, above). Yet, Elliott’s vampire-aberrations, the Sleepless, enact a further ‘divergence from a norm’, being mutations of human bodies that have been – through the neural chip our protagonist Thea has designed – denied any portion of sleep at all.

So, Thea – scientist – and Vladimir – aberration – pull us into what is a very insular novel; with dramatic staging (moonlit battlements), and all taking place in a single setting (the Tower of London), ‘Awakened’ is intimate and immediate and theatric in the best way. Incredible characterisation plays its part in carrying the staging; I was quite happy for the supporting characters to stay foggy and watered-down in the background because it serves to cast Thea and Vladimir into the spotlight.

Vlad’s provocative yet insightful character takes readers deep into moral rationalisations. He is Thea’s cross-examiner; it is Vlad who prompts us to consider whether Thea can be classified as a sympathetic protagonist. Her motivation is benevolent (combatting her mother’s M.E./C.F.S.): ‘If mother couldn’t be the moon anymore then I would be the tide that brought her home.’ Yet ‘Awakened’ is certainly, if anything, a hubris|nemesis novel. The retribution visited upon Thea in the climax is inevitably vivid and grisly. Thea is – as are readers – conflicted over whether she should pay, or, indeed, has already paid, her dues. Vlad questions her:

“Do you think that if you sacrifice enough you will find absolution? […] If you hurt yourself enough, deny yourself enough, you might be redeemed for the choices you’ve made?”

And if the names Thea (‘goddess’ in Greek) and Vladimir (‘ruler of the world’ in Slavic translation) seem conspicuous, you’d be right in suspecting that the naming of names is a strong theme in the novel: “names have power, even if they aren’t intended to control”, Vladimir says. This cannot help but conjure Genesis, where Adam was given the power to name/control ‘every living thing’ in the Garden of Eden. The nameless aberration we come to know as Vlad is nicknamed by those inside the battlements variously, The Count, Vlad the Impaler, Vladimir, Dracula, Dantès, Drac, “and I believe sometimes Adam”, Thea says. Vlad replies:

“And Adam is Biblical, perhaps? The first of my kind, like the first man?”

Symbolic in the most exemplary way, Eden as the backdrop to the birth of humankind is also the setting of ‘the Fall’ of humanity. Thus, Elliott likes to lay her parallels directly, and revels in signifying Garden of Eden imagery with her use of the motifs of incursion and expulsion, and thresholds, in what is essentially a classical siege narrative.

Thea immediately proceeds to invoke another textual touchpoint as she corrects Vladimir’s assumption:

“Yes and no. Adam was Edgar’s suggestion, and I think it was more to do with the Adam of Victor’s labours.”
“The child of Frankenstein? Charming.”
“Are you offended?”
[…] “Why should I be offended? It isn’t the child who’s the monster in the story.”

Elliott grabs Shelley’s image of the macabre laboratory and flips it so that her hubristic protagonist is working on post-mortems and tissue or fluid extraction, and the disassembly of her ghastly humanoid mutations, rather than assembly and vivification as per Frankenstein. The ‘Frankenstein’ plot is also back-to-front because Vladimir independently appears and presents himself for study, surrendering to the examination table himself.

Before he does so, however, Elliott takes the opportunity to overturn Mary Shelley’s deliberate choice not to assign a name to Victor Frankenstein’s ‘spectre’, Victor’s ‘creature’ in Shelley’s original text. Instead, Elliott dwells upon the deliberate act of naming Thea’s ‘fiend’. Vlad muses, “the absence of my name has begun to bother me more than it did before”, and he turns to the scientist, Thea, asking her to name him. She reacts:

‘[The] act of naming is intimate. It suggests a deep level of care for the one being named, and perhaps a certain level of ownership by the one doing the naming. Parents name their children. Owners name their pets. Scientists occasionally get to name our discoveries. I didn’t want the responsibility of claiming either ownership or care of him, but he’d offered it to me anyway.’

His choice of Vladimir signifies him as extremely powerful (‘ruler of the world’), and through inference, extremely cruel (Vlad the Impaler, known for his bloodthirstiness), as well as calling upon associations with imprisonment (Vlad Dracula was held in captivity for over a decade).

And here we are back at the Garden of Eden, and the gravity of separation from the rest of the world. The setting in ‘Awakened’ – what I would describe as a perverted Eden – is both a fortress and a prison, the Tower of London standing for protection and execution simultaneously. The Tower is a powerful emblem of some of Elliott’s most significant themes, and setting her narrative there is a type of shorthand for the kind of conflict and struggle for supremacy that will take place within its battlements over the course of the novel.

The Tower of London signifies English history, and here we have Elliott drawing that very history to a close in a novel of apocalypse. The Tower symbolises oppression, fear, the awe-full power (and wealth – Crown Jewels!) of the monarchy and yet – as a gateway into Medieval London – is an iconic symbol for the idea of a threshold. As with Eden, the threshold in any siege narrative carries the double threat of both eviction and infiltration.

Furthermore, illustrated on that glorious cover, Elliott plays with the trope of abandonment of the fortification defences, embodied by the Tower of London ravens, figures of lore and superstition: doom harbingers, power-holders, prophetic. Elliott’s choice of setting could not be more appropriately tied to her plot – the given associations of the Tower ravens portending the fall of the realm, summons precisely the right ominous tone. It’s also fun to analogise Vladimir to the Tower ravens: fiercely intelligent as are corvids; a game-player like them; a problem-solver (for Thea); a convincing mimic (of a human); he effectively has his wings clipped within the walls of the Tower, as the ravens do; and he is – above all – a blood-eater. The laboratory scene with the plate of raw meat is a spectacular canvas painting Vladimir as carrion guzzler. In fact, the science in ‘Awakened’ is nightmarishly real, until it slides into a kind of philosophical existentialism, which is yet perfectly paced.

I feel like smaller plot points in ‘Awakened’ need to be digested in order to savour the finale fully – Elliott doesn’t so much foreshadow as she does leave a trail of breadcrumbs to prepare your stomach for the hard-to-swallow conclusion. If she hadn’t tempted me all the way along with very gradual pacing, I fear I might have felt betrayed by the author for Thea’s final reckoning.

The climax lurches into the paranormal from the sci-fi:

‘I’ve always thought of sleep as a form of possession and dreams as a symptom of haunting. Waves of hormones roll through our bodies demanding obedience and unconsciousness, and as we sink beneath their weight our minds replay images and sounds that are beyond our conscious control. In sleep, we might see people long dead, hold conversations with absent friends, walk across landscapes both real and fictional, and wake to find that we never left our beds. Can there be anything more paranormal than that?’

The ending leaves you horrifically perplexed, but it HAS to! The scientists have to be driven mad by what they’ve done – look back to Vladimir’s earlier speech to Thea about redemption; she has to be damned because she has become the embodiment of the medical profession that ignored the suffering of her mother. She has ignored the suffering of the Sleepless. That is, until she can’t ignore it any longer. But that’s all I can say about it without spoilers!

Elliott fleshes-out much more than I ever could have anticipated in the development of her principal concept. The plot is so well executed that I was invested immediately. That’s not to mention that her writing style is thick and gooey and delectable (‘the wet mist swallowing sound like a librarian’). From meticulous attention to detail at the start, dealing with the scientific and the medical, to the ending that is the exact opposite: suggestive and inference-laden. The tension in this novel is awe-inspiring.

‘Sleep is the thread that binds us to memory, and with it, secures us to ourselves.’

Thank you to Angry Robot for the thrill of reading this astonishing debut. It is unlike anything I have read. If I had to draw comparisons, I would say ‘Private Rites’ by Julia Armfield and ‘The Memory of Animals’ by Claire Fuller, and as a Pandemic Novel, the flavour is somewhere in the same variety as ‘Eat the Ones You Love’ by Sarah Maria Griffin.

Near perfect blend of the Gothic and science fiction
—
Science doesn’t know exactly why we sleep and why we dream, but research overwhelmingly signals that we need both. In a near future London, Thea and her colleagues are holed up in the Tower of London, trying to understand the global epidemic of violence that they started with a brain chip. Those with the chip who are still alive are the Sleepless, literally unsleeping and animalistic. Thea is conflicted, having been part of the team that created the chip and trying to find a cure; when an intelligent, cogent member of the Sleepless enters the Tower, her understanding of the world pre-Sleepless and after will be undone. Will Thea have the strength to face her deepest fears and perhaps save her world?

With illness as the narrative driver and the metaphor for horror, this is a near perfect blend of the Gothic and science fiction, timeless yet set in a near future. Elliott is a new Mary Shelley, using the Tower of London as a palimpsest of time past, with all of its history, reality and above all its ghosts, and more crucially as a landscape character in an almost Peakian sense. What might the next room bring to the narrative? What horrors? What dashed hopes? Certainly Frankensteinian, but rather than creating a new Prometheus, this is about taking apart the new hellish creation. And in the end, who, really, are the monsters?

Four and a half stars

The world is over, and all that's left of humanity are the scientists that created the apocalypse and their handful of companions, trapped in the Tower of London, surrounded by the Sleepless, the feral humans with chips implanted in their brains. When two survivors arrive, Thea and the others are forced to consider if a cure is truly possible, and if it is, what that would mean for humanity.

I thought this book had a lot of interesting things to say about disability, technology that claims to fix our lives, and what is truly monstrous. I generally enjoyed the narrator, who was unreliable and very detached from her emotions. I thought it was more of a dystopian book than horror; although, there were plenty of parts of the book that were horrifying.

I found the ending of the book very confusing, and I was overall left with a lot of questions about what was actually happening in that compound. I enjoyed it, and I think I'll continue to think about a lot of the book, but I don't think I fully understood it with just one reading.

I've had to really ponder my feelings about Laura Elliot's Awakened. While technically a dystopian novel, I'm not sure how I feel about that label. I feel like it's a truly genre-defying exploration of chronic illness and its profound impact on both the individual and their loved ones.

Elliot's portrayal of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (M.E.) is remarkably vivid. She's clearly made extensive research or first-hand knowledge shines through, offering an unparalleled look at the condition and the medical establishment's approach to it.

Awakened is incredibly surreal and kept me completely enthralled for most of its duration. However, it unfortunately lost its way in the very final part. While the first half, with its slow pace and focus on characters and build up, was captivating, the shift towards Vladimir and increasingly metaphorical science led to a dip in engagement for me. The abstract and inconclusive ending further contributed to this feeling.

Despite these reservations, Awakened held my interest from start to finish. It's a debut brimming with ambitious ideas and compelling character development. While the execution fell slightly short of my expectations, I'm very eager to see what Laura Elliot writes next.

40/100 or 2.0 stars

This was such an interesting concept, but the writing style just really did not work for me. I couldn't get invested in what was going on in the story, which is unfortunate, since I was expecting to really like this based on the synposis when I requested it.

If you asked me to pick my favourite quote from this book then I would have an extremely tough time of it. I loved the writing style and just the words used to convey every emotion and plot point that was going on. There was some great commentary on everything from medical mistreatment to what it means to be human what can be justified in the name of ‘saving the world.’ Not only was it written excellently but it was super easy to read, which is not always the case with dense or even just thoughtful prose.
The struggles of our main character to see herself and the world as they really are was effective as well. Her arc develops naturally through the book and you can just see where it’s going and how everything is going to change by the end. The ending is a lot of reading between the lines and looking for what the imagery is telling you, so I didn’t find it the most compelling and it was a little abrupt but the buildup was absolutely there.
The cast of characters were not particularly focused on or developed outside of our main character but they definitely served their purposes in the story. I didn’t care for any of the romantic elements or storylines. There was less of them at the beginning than in the last third so I find myself having enjoyed that a little more.
Again, the commentary and horror elements that feel like they could happen in the real world was where I found my enjoyment in this read.

Awakened by Laura Elliott (book cover is in image) tells a tale of how, after the end of civilization the world is plagued with feral monsters created by tech implanted into humans that is supposed to prevent people from sleeping. Scientists, after finding a man who is not affected, believe that there is now hope to find a cure and save humanity.

The Narration by Antonia Beamish was excellently done. This was my first experience with her, and I will be seeking out more from her.

Thank you, @angryrobotbooks, @dreamscape_media / @dreamscape_lore and @netgalley, for the opportunity to read this ARC. All opinions are my own.

Rating: 4 Stars
Pub Date: Jun 10 2025
Audio Release: Aug 07 2025

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The blurb for this debut novel immediately hooked me as it felt like something straight out of Black Mirror, and I’m happy to say it delivered on that premise. Set in a dystopian world where sleep has been “cured” in the name of productivity, the result is a chilling breakdown of humanity and a haunting exploration of scientific ambition gone too far.

The concept is original and unsettling, and I loved the literary tone the author took in unpacking the consequences. The pacing did feel a bit stretched in places, and I think the story could’ve been tighter overall, but the atmosphere, themes, and thought provoking premise more than made up for it.

Thank you Angry Robot, NetGalley, and Dreamscape Media for the e-ARC and ALC in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Angry Robot for an Advanced Reader’s Copy in exchange for an honest review.

Awakened is set in London some thirty-five years in the future and follows the story of Doctor Thea Chares, a woman whose mother fell ill with chronic fatigue syndrome when Thea was just a girl. In an attempt to cure her mother’s illness, Thea worked as a doctor on a team of experimental scientists looking for a way to give the human body full function without the need to sleep. They succeed, but the neural chip they invent goes haywire, creating a quasi-zombie apocalypse of ‘Sleepless’.

Elliot’s prose is consistent, well done, and emotional. The story gives real insight into Thea’s background through present scenes and relevant, poignant flashbacks to her life prior to the apocalypse, living in the wake of her mother’s illness. Elliot also crafted fleshed out secondary characters that added fresh and important angles to the story.

The plot has a great balance of tension, conversation, and introspection. The final 10% of the novel lost me a little bit. Other than the ending not sticking the landing, I found this to be a solid and compelling dystopian novel that offered a fresh perspective on an oft-written narrative.

I’ve had to sit on this review for a while, trying to decide how I feel about the book.
Awakened I suppose it’s technically a dystopian novel but that doesn’t really do it justice, it’s genre defying. It is the exploration of a chronic illness, how it changes the life of the individual with the illness but also the effects on their loved ones.
Laura Elliot has either done impeccable research or has first hand knowledge of M.E. I have never seen such a vivid exploration of it and how the medical establishment treats it before.
Incredibly surreal, Awakened had me completely enthralled until the last 5% or so. After this unfortunately I feel like the book lost its way otherwise this would have been a 5*

Thank you to NetGalley and Angry Robot for the eArc

Bleak and horrifying in the best possible way. I loved the depths this book goes to and was surprised by how relatable I found it. Examines feelings of shame and regret in such interesting ways. I didn't see any of the twists coming and gasped out loud at some of them.