Wake by Elizabeth Knox - Book Review

I’ve had a hard time writing a review for Elizabeth Knox’s Wake, not because it wasn’t good, because it is very very good, but because spoiling the book would be criminal.

There are layers of information built into Wake that effortlessly set up the twists the story takes and knowing the story in advance would take away from some of the fun of reading this tale.

What I can tell you is that Wake isn’t quite like any other horror novel I’ve ever read. I wouldn’t be spoiling things to say that the novel starts off in the normally sleepy town of Kahukura where things have gone abruptly and terribly wrong. The protagonists are faced with a population gone violently mad, and the chapters at the start of the story are perhaps some of the most disturbing I’ve ever read. Knox works her description into the story without ever missing a beat, and I was absolutely hooked on Wake by page two. Knox takes the time to set up all of the characters involved so that you care about the death and destruction. After the visceral, bloody scares of the first chapters, the book makes a switch to a very different kind of horror. Knox skilfully builds the feeling of dread for the survivors as they try and make sense of what’s happened to them. Wake is very much a character driven book, and I loved the fact that these characters drive the plot rather than the other way around. No one does anything stupid merely for the sake of moving the plot forwards, and every single one of the characters we spend time with is a complete person with both virtues and flaws. I particularly liked spending time with Oscar, a teenage boy caught up in the events that have cut off his town, who still takes the time to feed the family cat even though his world is falling apart.

There are actually multiple different stories being told in Wake, from the near cosmic horror of the survivor’s situation to a detective story to a surprisingly sweet love story. There are some genuine moments of triumph and heartbreak that help ground Wake and turn something that could have been a fairly bulk standard horror tale and turn it into one of the best books I’ve read all year. It’s also capped off by one of the most surprising, yet most satisfying endings I’ve come across for some time. I finished up with Wake and had to go away and think about what I’d read before I wrote the review.

Brilliantly written without being pretentious, horrifying without being gratuitous and just plain awesome to read I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Wake to anyone who loves a great scary story.

Reviewed by Andrew Jack

Wake - GET IT HERE