by Matthew Warner

In fact, it's a routine workplace anti-terror attack exercise that sends Charlie spinning into an abyss of delusion and schizophrenic ravings which will rapidly ruin his life. Working as a male secretary in a DC law firm and watching his job slowly shrink toward eventual disappearance is bad enough. Add in the ineffectual terror attack "preparedness" nonsense par-for-the-course these days in DC, snarky co-workers, a mysterious sudden death, and baseless allegations of racism based on one ill-conceived comment, and Charlie's mind is primed for self-destruct. Who'll provide for his wife and children if he's downsized out? Who'll pay for the house Lisa so desperately wants, and the new child he's certain is on the way? How insignificant can one feel as he's forced to "look busy" so as to not attract undue attention? When he starts to notice connections between seemingly separate events and people, Charlie enters into a painful world of ever-magnifying fear. Why is he being followed? Why is he under covert surveillance, his every move covered by snipers? How can he save Lisa and his children? Charlie bolts.

At some point Charlie's very real fears, some of which we all share, become illusory. The novel is devastatingly serio-comic in the manner in which fantasy and reality begin to intertwine, where each dose of reality can be flipped on its head and repositioned. There's an automatic snicker we can't suppress when Charlie considers reinventing himself as a superhero, but the light comic moment makes the tragic events yet to come all the more shocking. The humor leaves a bad taste in your mouth and a frozen grin on your face when you realize that there's really nothing funny about this. There but for the grace of God, you might think. Charlie goes about rescuing his family from secret medical experiments carried out in an underground lab overseen by the wealthy father of his wife's friend. Is Philip Duke a politically connected criminal mastermind? Charlie's perceptions lead him to escalate by taking his lonely fight right to the enemy's lair, the very quest any hero would undertake. We have no choice but to go along.

Matthew Warner's Eyes Everywhere is a short novel, the impact of which is multiplied after the last page is turned. The mundane becomes so effectively enmeshed with the significant that the reader turns accomplice, seeing the brave new frightening world realistically through Charlie's eyes. He is helplessly seduced by the inversion which has made him the opposite of insignificant, and his plight is a scream for attention, a shout against the increasing personal invasion we all take for granted and almost willingly invite whenever we give up a slice of freedom for elusive security. Warner's success in portraying the medically realistic unraveling of his protagonist is matched only by the amazingly consistent voice he employs to narrate (as discussed in Gary A. Braunbeck's insightful Afterword), filtering every event through Charlie. It's a bravura performance, a monologue on madness, and it will stick with you during long, lonely nights—those times you first realize that we are all Charlie Fields, then succumb to fitful sleep knowing there's more out there you don't want to know about. Paranoia does strike deep, as the wise old song said. And Matt Warner knows how to take advantage.