The story never steps away from Spence’s version of events, letting the reader steep in his shattered mind. To the point where the concept of any objective truth is under attack by what one side considers to be the barbarians at the gate and vice versa. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Where a story like this could focus on action and set pieces, this story gives this main relationship the spotlight, and is all the more original for it. I did not know what to expect when I picked this book up, but as soon as I entered Devlin’s domain, I was hooked.

The narrator is one of the bounced ones and we follow his story as he tries to make sense of the strange new world he finds himself in. What I can disclose is that Devlin has created a tense horror story that is quick to read but slow to leave your thoughts.But after he befriends Leila, a new inmate, and learns her story, he must consider if it’s better to confront an ugly and painful truth or to live a dangerous, but in some ways comforting, lie. And then I woke up doesn't work because it's not logical in the same way that finding that the murderer in a murder mystery is a character we've never heard of or the main character turns out to be a cat or the hero wins the lottery or the cavalry comes riding over the hill or any one of a hundred different bad cheating endings that have nothing to do with the story.

Spence’s recitation of his story is both fascinating and stomach churning as he lists explicit details and questions his own motives and perspective. Then you look a little closer and see a dark figure in shades of black and grey, in a cloud of gloomy brush strokes, sitting on a chair with a knife at his feet. A mind-altering virus puts a stranglehold on the world and the survivors don’t know what to believe or who to trust. What stuck in my mind after I turned the last page was the question of which side truth was really on?Which would also be fine, but it pulled me out of the story to wonder if the vagueness of the location was intended as a wink to Australian readers while making the story feel more local to, let's say, Americans, which then derailed my thought process quite a bit from the point the narrator was making. Set in a world where the ‘infected’ are those who are made to believe there is a zombie invasion by the media narrative, our protagonist is recovering from his infection as a newly ‘cured’ member of society in a rehab facility of sorts. But if he can’t tell the truth from the lies, how will he know if he has earned the redemption he dreams of?

If there aren’t any physical signs to look for, how does he know if he’s not slipping back into the disease? And Then I Woke Up takes place in a not-so-distant future where an atypical illness leaves monsters in its wake.On the outside, Spence seeks redemption for the atrocities he committed as he tries to determine which narrative is true. And Then I Woke Up is a deft and moving novella about the ways in which with stories we make and unmake the world—and sometimes lose track of reality in the process. Two people might see the exact same thing but come away with two different interpretations of what happened. You have the Others, the infected, the uninfected, and the survivors, to name a few, each of which means something different to different people, and the meanings aren’t always easy to distinguish because you have to remember who’s using these terms and what experiences they’ve had.