The Waking Dark

The Waking Dark
by Robin Wasserman
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
2013
454 pages




This is a fairly new horror book for teens by author Robin Wasserman. I had not read any of her books and the premise of this one appealed to me, but in many ways it fell short of my expectations.

This book is full of action but it is really disjointed. It took me nearly 100 pages to figure out who were the main characters of the book. They are:

• Daniel Ghent: son of the crazy Preacher, survivor of a drug store shooting, brother of 8-year-old Milo
• Jule Prevette: niece of the local meth producer, seeking to get away from her life, survivor of a family stabbing incident
• Ellie King: a very devout teen who yearns to help her town but becomes a martyr instead, witness of the crucifixion of the church handyman by the religious leader at her church
• Jeremiah West: gay member of the football team, witness of an inexplicable hit and run accident of his friend, Nick
• Cassandra Porter: typical teenage girl until she dropped the baby boy she was babysitting out of a second story window and yet has no memory of doing it

The main catalyst for this story is a tornado which wipes out part of Oleander, Kansas. The disaster leaves the town shocked and people come together to clean up, but then the citizens begin to notice something strange. Although their cell phone and internet service is down, they had imagined that government volunteers and television crews would be descending on their town and helping everyone get back to normal. What happens instead is that their town is surrounded by supposed military personnel who enclose the entire town and tell everyone they are not allowed to leave "for their safety".

Tornado over Greensburg, Kansas in 1915

This is when things go drastically wrong. People begin to act in ways that are either uncharacteristic or more extreme, and never in a good way. They begin to commit crimes against each other, raiding stores, assaulting  and murdering people, looking for scapegoats such as Cassandra, who has escaped her nearby mental institution during the storm and has come back to hide near her home. Before too long, the people of the town have descended into the "dark" that has awakened in their minds and anarchy reigns. 

We don't learn what has caused the change until Cassandra and the doctor from her facility, who was captured, too, and thrown in the town's prison, escape with help from our other teenagers. The doctor is forced to tell the kids what she knows. They learn that they alone were given immunity to a drug called R8-G through their flu shots which, combined with a local natural condition that was aggravated by the tornado, is the perfect chemical weapon. The nearby facility was not a mental hospital/prison, as folks believed, but a chemical company's home base where they could experiment on the local population. Cassandra was injected with the drug, which led to hallucinations and caused her to black out when she committed her murder of the baby. R8-G causes people to commit atrocities to each other, quickly developing to a mass extermination of a population, I guess just to see what would happen. The company is keeping the town hostage while the drug continues to take effect, knowing that the end means that no one will survive.

I admire the teens who gradually find each other and band together to get out. They not only want to help themselves but they want to help the town. It is a small town and most people know each other. It is unfortunate that not all of our main characters could be saved, and the remainder feel and express real regret about that.

What I most disliked about the story was its lack of structure, its rambling prose that has trouble getting to the point. As I said before, Wasserman really took her time getting to the main action of the story and identifying the main characters and plot lines. We don't even learn about the fake government agency angle and the mind-altering drug explanation until Chapter 12, page 314. The insertion of "Oh, by the way" facts about the characters throughout the story was rather distracting and didn't help the story progress, or at best, just confused it. I don't necessarily object that we follow the story lines of several characters, but I think spending more time with them one at a time would have worked better. Also, focusing in on the main action instead of taking tangents all over the place would make a much tighter story. I think a good 100 pages could have been cut from the entire book by tightening up the story and removing tedious, superfluous details.

I would say this story is geared towards middle teens. It is a self-contained story, with no sequel-to-come feeling. While I didn't feel it was a complete waste of time reading it, I wouldn't put it on my best teen horror book list.