Them Or Us

Them Or Us

By David Moody

Enough about having kids. Let's talk zombies! (Some mild spoilers ahead. Nothing serious though).

I'm not sure whether David Moody began writing Them Or Us that he expressly attempted to write a book bleaker and more hopeless than The Road by Cormac McCarthy. If this was his aim, he has succeeded. While he may not have McCarthy's gift of poignant prose (who does?), Moody sure does have the ability to suck every ounce of hope out of a book in a right hurry. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing in the zombie genre, it takes a strong will to muscle through this series. Casual zombie fans, beware, this is heavy-duty nerd territory.

Them Or Us is the third in the Hater Series (for the others in the series see Hater and Dog Blood), and the bleakest of the lot of them. Considering that each novel ends on a low note, that's saying something. What started out as a kick-ass spin on the traditional zombie tradition (Hater) quickly descends into chaos (Dog Blood) and finally a dissertation on the apocalyptic end game.

The Hater series follows the life of Danny McCoyne, a mild-mannered municipal government employee who , along with a substantial portion of the British population, seem to randomly develop something called: The Hate. It is a disease (or whatever) of unknown origin that compels those afflicted to kill those unaffected in the most violent and cruel ways possible. the result is an all-out disintegration of modern society in a matter of weeks. The world descends into utter and complete chaos. It's an interesting spin on the traditional zombie tradition in that it gives the "zombies" a form of sentience and therefore allows the protagonist to be a "zombie" himself without having to resort to pages and pages of: "uhhhnnngh.... nnnnnggggghhhh!"

While the first novel left me elated and keen to read the rest of the series, both Dog Blood and (especially) Them or Us left me asking "What was the point?" Once it becomes established that non-Haters have lost the war and those with the Hate are in control of the world, it's like reading a zombie novel for zombies by zombies about being a zombie in a zombie world. Where am I supposed to place my allegiances? Now, I'm  pretty sure that exactly the reaction Moody was going for since there is never any explanation as to what the Hate is or where it comes from. In Moody's world, things happen far too fast for anyone to stop and consider the scientific origins of human devolution. But by the end of the series when there is obviously nothing left (not even hope) one must ask: "No, seriously... what WAS the point?"

Well, obviously, the metaphor.

Most zombie culture tends to focus on the initial rise of the undead and the chaotic first hours and days of the apocalypse as a metaphor for our own wicked ways. David Moody (as well as Joan Frances Turner in her excellent novel, Dust) is far more interested in how things play out once the apocalypse is upon us and in its denouement. With the added bonus of sentient zombies, we get an all-out war that includes the dropping of several nuclear warheads on the already scarred English landscape. Them or Us follows the final days of Danny McCoyne as he tries to maneuver himself through a politicized zombie world where non-zombies (almost) cease to exist and the rest seem to be out to destroy each other as best they can. As with so much other zombie canon, it's an unsubtle metaphor for our own over-comsuption. And while I love me a good metaphor, I don't want to be bludgeoned with it.

But even the bleakest of all zombie culture (or Cormac McCarthy novels) seem to leave an ounce of hope at the end. something the reader or viewer can take with them, an open-ended conclusion to which we can all ascribe a semblance of hope. Not here, my friends. If you are looking for a pick-me-up novel to wash away the doldrums or a nice light summer read, steer clear, my friends. But ifs you are in the mood for all out human disintegration on virtually every level (familial, societal, emotional and biological) then David Moody is your man.

Not to put too much of an academic spin on this, but I got the impression that Moody took Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene to it's illogical extreme and posited what would happen if we became that selfish gene and lives our lives for there express purpose of eliminating all other competition (while simultaneously NOT procreating). I wonder whether Moody has read about E.O. Wilson's controversial new Theory of Social Evolution that supposes that human altruism is an evolutionary necessity rather than simply the notion of procreating and protecting our own. Okay, it's not the best metaphor, but anytime I can through Dawkins and Wilson into a post about zombies, I have to take my chances.

All this is not to say I didn't enjoy the series. I did. Very much. Especially the first book (WOW!). But the series certainly had its flaws. There were all sorts of points where I questioned Danny McCoyne's judgment. Why would a sentient zombie who has lost his entire family, nearly died in a nuclear blast, currently riddled with cancer while being used by political factions on all sides agree to help another sentiment zombie leader after the literary equivalent of "C'mon.... just do it! I'll be your friend!" But of course, I don't have the Hate so I cannot comment on how those that do have it make their judgments. But all that is worth overlooking since Moody is exploring territory that few zombies writers (George Romero included) have not: The End of Times via Zombie. If you are a fan of the dystopian apocalyptic genre, this is certainly not a series that you can overlook.

Casual fans should stick to Max Brooks.

Zombie haters? There's always Twilight.

Shout Out

One of my favorite blogs to visit is The Boston Bibliophile. I've taken more than one recommendation from her and she is still batting 1.000.

Dog Blood

Dog Blood

By David Moody

True to my new year's resolution, I have finally read the second book in one of the series I have started over the past three years. Believe me, I'm feeling pretty emboldened right about now. So much so that I also installed a towel rack in the bathroom and walked the dogs. I'm getting shit done today! Don't even try and slow me down!

...

So, anyway, yeah....

Dog Blood is the second book in the Hater series by David Moody. I read the first book, Hater, last year and enjoyed the hell out of it. I think Moody's approach to the widening modern zombie canon is both refreshing and innovative in that he broadens the scope enough to see out the entire arc of the zombie apocalypse by making his zombies rational, thinking killers rather than the classic brain-eating drone. The result is a novel that is so relentless, so uncompromising that I actually finished it in one sitting... a rare feat. For a longer and more in depth take on the first book in Moody's neo-zombie trilogy go check out my blog post on Hater.

Dog Blood wasn't quit so relentless. It couldn't possibly be. Whereas Hater chronicles the first days of the war between the Haters and the Unchanged, Dog Blood takes us into the endless war of attrition that has settled over the planet. That sense of panic that Moody portrayed so well in the first book is replaced by an all-pervasive fear. A remorseless fear of what may (or may not) be coming. The first half of the novel is a bit slow (plodding at times). Characters drift in and out of the narrative as they interact with Danny, the main character (and Hater) who, by nature, has very little affinity for anyone or anything aside from killing and finding his five-year old daughter. But the slower bits at the front end lull the reader into the false sense of security that everything is going to even out. Right before Moody blows everything out of the water once again.

Once things pick up about two thirds of the way through the novel, Dog Blood is every bit and graphic and gory as Hater, often more so. Moody has a wonderfully sick and twisted mind, especially when it comes to his portrayal of children. There are some scenes in this novel that will spawn nightmares for me over the next few weeks and most of them will involved kids. Yikes!

I would have liked to see some more inventing murder scenes. I mean, if you are committed to writing such a graphic novel, It would be cool to see Moody get imaginative the ways Danny and Ellie kill people. Alas, it's a small complaint. with or without novel kill scenes, the smell of rotten viscera practically emanates from the last pages of the book. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

The reason for the onset of the Hate, as it is called, is still not explained, but that's okay. Given that the entire book is a chronicle of the utter chaos unleashed on humanity one doesn't expect to get clinical answers as to why. The characters don't know (and at this point will never know) and so the readers are left i the dark as well. As it should be with zombie stories. In a true catastrophe nobody would have time to find the answers. Nobody would even bother asking. It's simple all action, all the time.

While I usually demand interesting characters, with zombie literature I don't, mainly because character studies and zombies don't mix. Zombies don't have character and they spend their time killing the people that do, so best not get attached to any particular character. In Dog Blood the characters are as two-dimensional as they need to be given that the world is a place where life means less than a truck full of dead rats. Who's got time for character study when you know they'll be dead in a paragraph or two anyway.

In fact, life is so cheap in Moody's world that the entire trilogy thus far feels like a prequel to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. McCarthy never explains how the world in his novel because such a bleak, unforgiving landscape of torment and death, but one doesn't have to look further than Moody for a possibility (I know, I know... there's no way that The Road involved zombies in any sort of incarnation, and comparing the two books feels kind of funny, but the mood definitely exists). There is a real feeling of impending desolation and hopelessness in the series and I can't imagine Moody is setting us up for a happy ending and I'd be disappointed if he somehow provided one. One can almost see the end of the trilogy: Danny desperately walking along the road toward the ocean with his little girl. The parallels are creepy.

While not quite as good as the Hater, Dog Blood is the necessary sequel and does exactly what is needed to bridge the gap between the the onset of the neo-zombie apocalypse and its conclusion. Some questions have been answered but not nearly enough to satisfy the reader and there's enough gore pack in there to make George Romero uneasy and Moody finishes Dog Blood in absolutely spectacular fashion (one wonders if he takes lessons from Steig Larsson). Like the weight of the pulsing zombie horde, it will be virtually impossible to hold off reading the third book for very long.

Since I'm already motivated, I'm gonna go board up the windows, and start the final novel. This dude needs some closure.

Hater

Hater

By David Moody

These days, it is rare that I finish a book in a single sitting. The conditions required for such an event (readable book + large, uninterrupted chunks of time) are not easy to come by. I'm a busier man and a more jaded reader than I was when I read Johnny Got His Gun in a single six hour sitting at the age of sixteen (or A Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy hours before a final exam in first year university). In fact, I haven't read many books in a single sitting. This probably has a lot to do with why I can't sit still for movies, either.

As it turns out the conditions necessary for a single-day read were ideal yesterday. We were having some screen doors and windows installed at our house and, in true Taiwanese fashion, the workers told us they would come by sometimes between 8am and 4pm. Typical.

I cleared my Monday schedule (Monday is actually a light day for me, anyhow) in anticipation for the long wait and picked up Hater by David Moody. It's been on my shelf for a few months. It was given to my by a friend who never really endorsed it or recommended it, just handed it over and told me I might like it. I didn't much like the cover and I hadn't bothered to find anything out about it so I always managed to pick something else up in the meantime. By yesterday it had become a festering sore on my bookshelf. It had been there so long it was actually offending me. So I opened the damned thing figuring I could read it and get it on its way.

Little did I know.

Oh boy, was this book right up my alley. By page 25 I knew I was in for one of those days. Everything was going to come second. Lunch? It could wait. Walk the dogs? They don't really need it. Let the workers in? OK, I did that... at 3pm. On any other day I would have been livid, but since I was neck deep in Hater, I barely noticed. In fact I barely noticed when the workers left and my teaching hours were approaching. I was almost late for work, not that it mattered, I was going to find a way to continue reading at work, anyway. Nothing, but nothing was going to stand in the way of me and the last page of this book, which i reached by 10pm, following my usual Monday teaching schedule.

What, by god, could this book be about that would send a grown man diving for sofas and scuttling into corners in order to read a couple more pages? Essentially, Hater follows the classic storyline of a burgeoning zombie apocalypse. Unassuming man with crappy life starts to vaguely notice strange occurances happening all around him, most of which involve gorily inventive deaths of random strangers. Soon, these arbitrary attacks are happening with more frequency and they begin to close themselves in around the central character. People seem to be transforming from mild-mannered citizens into blood-thirsty killers at a rate far too rapid for authorities to handle. The situation declines at an exponential rate. The attacks are all over the news, while the news continues to broadcast, and what was, at first, a breaking news story has transformed itself into total societal collapse. Awesome!

But it's not zombies.

This is where Hater takes the twist it desperately needed to take. Had this been yet another book about the zombie hordes, it would have taken a miracle for it to follow through. As much as I like the zombie genre, its scope is limited and there are only so many directions you can go with mindless, fleash-eating drones. Max Brooks did a stellar job of re-inventing the genre a few years back with World War Z but David Moody was taking us zombie freaks on a ride in an entirely new, and more intelligent direction.

Zombies, by nature, are interesting insofar as they take the world by surprise and in large numbers. But once the collapse of the establisment is complete and the zombies cease to be a surprise to those who remain living, it is hard to maintain story momentum. Ask Robert Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead. Trying to write a serial comic about a post-apocalyptic world over-run by zombies can get difficult and writers are forced to rely heavily on human relationships under stress, since deconstructing the zombie mind would be an exercise in hilarious futility.

The genre has been in need of a major overhaul for years and David Moody has taken the zombie theme in an interesting new direction that enables him to transcend the authoratarian style and write within the post-apocalyptic world with a lot more freedom than traditional zombie writers. He will be able to move from one side to the other with ease and expand on the ideas and theories he has brought to life in Hater.

I can't really say much more than that without ruining the book and the overall storyline going into book two. It is, after all, the first in a trilogy and going ahead and spoiling the first reveal would be a literary crime. Rest assured that this long-time zombie fan and sci-fi freak spent every page of this book riveted. Moody maintains the suspense right up to the last sentence, reveals enough to leave the reader satisfied but leaves enough questions unanswered to ensure I read the next book. Naturally, that's the aim of writing the first novel in a trilogy, but it's surprising how may authors are incapable of pulling that off.

Must make a mental note to add Dog Blood, the second book in the trilogy to my Amazon wish-list. If it is even half what Hater was, I will be losing another day in the coming months.