Hater – Apocalyptic Horror Novel by David Moody
Chilling Film Adaptation Being Produced by Guillermo del Toro
It’s a brutally simple premise, evoked with skill, that should place Hater alongside The Day of the Triffids, Survivors, The Death of Grass and other fictional end-of-society scenarios that play on contemporary imaginations.
The focus of the story is Danny McCoyne, a young father and underachiever who works for the council. He and his wife, Lizzie, are staving off poverty as they scrimp to rear three young children.
A Surgeon Slashes His Patient
Danny is late for work one day after witnessing a ‘disgusting’ street attack by man with an umbrella on an old lady. It’s not an isolated incident.
At a rock concert, the lead singer brains a band member with his guitar. Elsewhere, a dull husband kills his wife, a surgeon slashes his vasectomy patient’s scrotum and a teenage girl bludgeons her best friend.
This is genuinely mindless violence – unprovoked, unplanned, normal people transformed into remorseless killers. The media dubs them Haters.
Encroaching Horror on the Streets
The brilliance of Moody’s portrayal is the juxtaposition of Danny and Lizzie’s mundane daily grind – the horrible boss, the demanding kids, the lack of sex, the disapproving father-in-law – with the encroaching horror on the streets. He plays Danny’s first-person narrative against third-person depictions of the attacks.
Danny watches on TV as what appears to be typical Saturday-night, town-centre aggro escalates. The reader knows he and his loved ones can’t escape for long.
Moody excels in building the tension and dread. The reader shares Danny’s fear of meeting anyone’s eyes on the street, seeing the armed police on the town square, the unanswered 999 calls, the fear of a Hater joining the near-empty train carriage he’s travelling on.
Playing on the Reader's Inner Fears of Violence
When Danny witnesses a nine-year-old battering her mother with food tin in a supermarket that’s being looted, the implications horrify him. Could his children attack him and Lizzie? Could he and Lizzie batter their offspring?
When he looses his temper with Lizzie, who’s questioned the odd supplies he’s stolen, she recoils from him, fearing the worst.
Moody’s story magnifies the reader’s everyday, inner fears – the nutter encountered on the way home from the pub, the road-rage driver. But here, every confrontation is a fight to the death.
Sequel
Unlike many apocalyptic stories, there is no boffin who can decipher what’s going on. Instead, the media looses it message in the breakdown, the news bulletins being reduced to a public information warning played on a loop – stay calm and don’t panic, prepare a safe room for your family, wait for instructions.
The author pushes Hater relentlessly to its logically disturbing, medieval conclusion. Only at the end are there story elements that will feel unsatisfactory to some readers.
On the other hand, the ending is intentionally ambiguous, concluding with what sounds like a self-serving message from a deceased government minister. The fact that he was in the defence ministry and that Moody has been working on the first of two sequels, Dog Blood (2010), indicates the vague bits could soon be explored further.
Moody Published 'Autumn' as a Free Internet Download
Moody is a fascinating success story. He published his 2001 novel Autumn (a ‘bastard hybrid of Day of the Triffids and Night of the Living Dead,’ he calls it) as a free internet download. Half-a-million downloads and four sequels later, he achieved what most writers only dream of – building his own fan base and having no publishers to answer to.
He launched his own imprint – Infected Books – in 2005, selling tens of thousands of his books. Since then his success has meant he has sold Hater, its sequels and the five-book Autumn series to Thomas Dunne Books in the US. Subsidiary rights were sold around the world and Moody closed Infected to concentrate on his writing.
Meanwhile, the movie adaptation of Autumn (starring Dexter Fletcher and the late David Carradine) is due for release this summer. A film version of Hater is coming in 2010, produced by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage).
In a year when the BBC is also producing new series of Survivors and The Day of the Triffids, there’s no doubt that David Moody has written one of the most uncompromising visions of man’s self-annihilation.
- Hater, ISBN 9780575084681, is published in paperback in the UK by Orion Books, 10 September 2009
Hater by David Moody
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