David Moody's Blog, page 27

Isolation audiobook now available

Hello! Long time no speak. I’ve had my head down writing AUTUMN: DAWN for the last couple of months, and haven’t had much chance to come up for air. If you’re interested, I’m having a total blast diving deep into the world of AUTUMN again. I needed the long(ish) break from zombies, but I don’t think I’ll ever really stop writing about them.

Back in 2014, though, I thought the undead and I were going to part company forever. I wanted to move onto something new, and I decided to release a couple of zombie novellas to celebrate. The first was THE COST OF LIVING, which was quickly followed by ISOLATION (and both stories were collected in the LAST OF THE LIVING paperback).

Keith’s in his early twenties. No girlfriend, no hobbies, no future. He spends his days working in an office and his evenings, weekends and just about all his free time looking after his alcoholic dad.

And then the zombie apocalypse changes everything.

Suddenly Keith’s free. For the first time in a long time, he’s got nothing to worry about (apart from several hundred thousand reanimated corpses heading his way).

But then he meets Anna, and everything changes again. Cocky, cool, confident… she’s everything Keith isn’t. Holed-up together in an isolated bungalow, besieged by the living dead, will they survive, or will they tear each other apart before the dead get anywhere near?

I’m pleased to announce that, at long last, ISOLATION is available as an audiobook from AUDIBLE and APPLE. Chris Lawson (follow him on Twitter at @ChrisMLawson) did a fine job of narrating Keith and Anna’s tragic decline in a municipal park surrounded by tens of thousands of zombies.

I have a few promo codes to share. If you’d like a copy of the book, please complete the form below. Numbers are limited, and I’m afraid the offer is restricted to UK and US only (Audible’s restriction, not mine).

Your details will ONLY be used for the purposes of sending an Audible promotion code to you. The codes will be issued over the next few days. Feel free to claim a couple of books. All I ask in return is an honest review once you’re done listening.

[contact-form-7]

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Chaos Theories

Over the years, many people have found their way to my books via the AUTUMN and HATER novels or through the collaborations I’ve worked on with other authors such as THE BLEED and THE FRONT. As a result, it sometimes feels like my standalone novels fall through the cracks. For that reason, I’ve put together a reasonably priced eBook box-set of three already reasonably priced books – STRAIGHT TO YOU, TRUST and STRANGERS.

CHAOS THEORIES is now available from Amazon.

Thanks to DAVID SHIRES for handling the artwork.

And for those who still prefer print, there are a limited number of bundles of the same three novels available direct from Infected Books for the low price of £15.

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DOG SOLDIERS

Just prior to the second national lockdown starting here, and in the absence of many new releases, our local cinema showed a series of classic horror movies. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned how close we live to a cinema before. It’s literally a five-minute walk from my front door, and in the eight or so years we’ve lived in this spot, it’s been a source of gainful part-time employment for three of our daughters. I love the place and have been keen to support it whenever its doors have been open during the nightmare which has been 2020. I managed to catch a couple of films, the first of which was NEIL MARSHALL’S werewolf classic, DOG SOLDIERS.

Here’s a quick synopsis from IMDB: A British Squad is sent on a training mission in the Highlands of Scotland against Special Operations squad. Ignoring the childish “campfire” stories heard about the area, they continue with their mission and come across the bloody remains of the Special Ops Squad, and a fierce howling is pitching the night sky… With two mortally wounded men, they make an escape, running into a zoologist by the name of Megan – who knows exactly what hunts them. What began as what they thought was a training mission turns into a battle for their lives against the most unlikely enemies they would have expected – werewolves.

I’m a sucker for a good werewolf story (have I ever mentioned that HATER actually started life as a werewolf tale?), but that’s the problem – good werewolf stories are frustratingly hard to find. AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON remains my favourite by far, but Marshall’s 2002 debut definitely makes the grade. There’s a 4k remaster just released here in the UK, and it was the restored version which was screened. It was the first time I’d seen DOG SOLDIERS for a decade or more, and I’m pleased to report that it’s still as bloody, funny, and bloody funny as it was when it first hit the screens.

There’s an explosive energy about DOG SOLDIERS that reminds me of the first two EVIL DEAD movies and PETER JACKSON’S early films. Whilst DOG SOLDIERS is far more grounded and earthy that any of those films, it’s often as frenetic and exciting. Belying the film’s miniscule budget, Marshall delivers a claw and fang-filled tour-de-force which puts to shame other films with ten times the money to spend.

I’m surprised the werewolf genre hasn’t been exploited more over the years. Most books and films follow the same predictable beats with the focus often being on some poor tortured soul who is attacked and becomes a werewolf and goes on a ferocious killing spree until someone puts them out of their misery. Not DOG SOLDIERS. Here we have a different approach, with a squad of fresh, but competent, soldiers stumbling (not by chance, we later learn) on a remarkably civilised family of werewolves for whom howling at the moon and killing locals appears to be just another facet of everyday life.

It’s this originality that carries the film, and the enjoyment is ramped up several notches by a healthy dose of humour and disrespect. The cast is strong, particularly the brilliant SEAN PERTWEE and GAME OF THRONES’S Davos Seaworth, LIAM CUNNINGHAM. Snappy editing, creative camerawork, and assured direction keep things moving quickly towards an effective ending.

The werewolves themselves are often the weak point of werewolf movies, and here it’s clear that the filmmaker’s resources were limited. Again, though, DOG SOLDIERS doesn’t suffer because of its budget: the creatures are sufficiently unique in appearance (did I read somewhere that they were played by ballet dancers on stilts?) and they’re usually glimpsed quickly or shown in silhouette. To have shown more, I think, would have reduced their effectiveness.

DOG SOLDIERS is a truly great werewolf film, and if you haven’t yet seen it, can I recommend you put that right at your earliest convenience. With all the chatter surrounding the remastered re-release of the film, I’ve heard talk of a possible sequel. Count me in. I look forward to getting back to the cinema round the corner in a hopefully post-pandemic world for more of Marshall’s lycanthropy. In the meantime, it’s really made me want to write that werewolf novel…

The remastered version of DOG SOLDIERS is streaming now on Apple and Amazon.

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10 years of AUTUMN

Hard to believe today is the 10 year anniversary of the mass market release of AUTUMN. It had been around for another 10 years prior to that, of course, first as a very basic free download, then as an independent release through Infected Books. I just happened to be on holiday in New York with the family at the time, and I’ll never forget the buzz of walking into Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue and finding copies on display in the wild (see picture below). It was the beginning of an unforgettable period in my career.

Fast forward a decade, and here I am writing AUTUMN novels again! I thought the series was done and dusted in 2013 with the release of AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION, but over the last couple of years I found myself thinking more and more about the world of AUTUMN, and I came across a new story I really wanted to tell.

Go back to 2001 when I started sharing AUTUMN online for the first time, and it was a very different world. The Internet was just starting to get its claws into everyday life (and that was part of the reason I started giving the book away for free at the time), but we were nowhere near as reliant on the web and our phones as we are today, and the idea of social media hadn’t yet raised its ugly head. The surviving characters in the first AUTUMN books were isolated from the rest of the world at the exact moment everyone else dropped dead, immediately unable to contact anyone else. No one to ask for help. No one to answer their thousands of questions. Nothing but absolute, unending, suffocating radio silence.

So, how would things be different today? Maybe the last few hours and days before the power dies and the networks fail will be enough time for those desperate survivors to communicate and coordinate? Maybe they’d be able to piece together what was happening from the global population’s dying digital remains?

And there’s another huge difference between the people who survived the AUTUMN epidemic back in 2001 and those who’d make it if the events of the book had taken place in 2020. Zombies! Back in the day, there was an unwritten rule that the people in zombie stories didn’t know what zombies were, but after a couple of decades filled with THE WALKING DEAD and its variations, 28 DAYS LATER, and countless other zombie books, TV series and movies, it seems unlikely that any survivors would now be that naive. They’re going to have more of an idea of what’s going on and how they’re going to have to deal with it, and they certainly wouldn’t be as green as Michael, Carl and the others were in the first scenes of AUTUMN. Maybe that’ll be their undoing, because the living dead in the AUTUMN books certainly don’t play by the same rules as other zombies. It would be wrong to assume and underestimate what they’re capable of…

But I guess the biggest immediate difference between the original series and the new trilogy, is scale. The groups of survivors in the original series were small in number – usually less than 30, hopelessly outnumbered. Not the case for my new characters, who have to deal with the zombie apocalypse in the middle of London. This means there will likely be hundreds of people left alive, but they’ll be surrounded by literally millions of zombies. In the original books you could go for hours without seeing one of the walking dead. This time around, there are hordes of them around every single corner. I’m having a blast writing these new books. The whole trilogy has been scoped out in detail, with the intention of writing and releasing the novels in quick-fire succession during 2021.

So happy birthday, AUTUMN. Here’s to a brand new chapter beginning early next year.

 

 

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Hardcode

I’m incredibly excited to announce that CRAIG PATON has agreed to design the covers for the new AUTUMN trilogy I’m currently writing. I couldn’t be happier. Craig has produced some iconic covers for me over the years – TRUST, AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION, STRAIGHT TO YOU and STRANGERS. Recently, he’s had a huge amount of success with KILLTOPIA – a cyberpunk graphic novel he created alongside writer DAVE COOK.

I’d planned to post here tonight to promote Craig’s new project – HARDCODE – but he’s doing a hell of a job promoting it himself. The recently launched Kickstarter was funded within 6 hours! Stretch targets are now in place, and the support is flooding in. Please check out the Kickstarter embedded below and consider backing Craig’s project.

Click here for more information about HARDCODE.

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Free eBook

Just a quick reminder that when you sign up for my mailing list, you can download a free eBook sampler of my work. It’s just been updated to include SCRATCH – my novella from the Infected Books 2016 YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE project – as well as ANGEL, my favourite AUTUMN short story, and THE DEAL which is horrible little tale torn from the pages of THE LAST BIG THING.

Click here or on the cover below for more information. No junk, spam or nonsense, I promise. I generally only send newsletters when there’s a new release on the horizon. And I’m planning several of those for 2021.

Who is that handsome fellow? Why, that’s me on the set of the AUTUMN movie. What a stunner.

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Support The Last Survivors

The pandemic has impacted pretty much every aspect of pretty much everyone’s lives. This has been a spiralling, disorientating year for everyone and I don’t know about you, but I think we’ve still got a long, long, long way to go to get back to anything like a semblance of normality.

I’m really missing live events. I watch films and TV shows now and feel a wave of sadness every time I see a crowd. It’s crazy, isn’t it – who’d have ever thought we’d have to spend so much time apart? I’d love to be part of a mass of people again; the collective anticipation of thousands of fans as their favourite band takes the stage, the tribal roar of the supporters when their team puts in a winning performance, hundreds laughing together at a comedian’s jokes, the shared panic as a handful of strangers race through an abandoned nuclear bunker with a pack of bloodthirsty zombies snapping at their heels…

My friends at THE LAST SURVIVORS have been running hugely popular zombie experiences in Essex for almost a decade, and like so many other groups working in the entertainment and creative industries, their business has been decimated as a result of coronavirus. If you’ve not come across them before, have a read of this article from 2012 when my pal Ryan Fleming was dispatched to try their zombie experience for himself.

With almost all of their 2020 events cancelled, THE LAST SURVIVORS are now taking bookings for 2021. You can find full details on their website. If you’re in the area and fancy spending a couple of hours being scared sh*tless in a terrifying Cold War relic, please sign up. The setting is perfect (see here, here and here), and the event is brilliant (don’t take my word for it – check out the Tripadvisor reviews and the stats below).

In the meantime, the team have produced an online experience to tide you through the pandemic. This ties in to the new story the team will be unveiling next year. It’s about an hour long, £9.95 to play, and a huge amount of fun. Play it like I did – lights off and headphones in – for full effect. Click here for more information.

 

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#ALIVE

If you’re in need of a quick zombie movie fix this Sunday afternoon (and let’s face it, who isn’t?), can I recommend #ALIVE, a South Korean movie which is available now on Netflix. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but I liked it quite a lot.

As a grisly virus rampages a city, a lone man stays locked inside his apartment, digitally cut off from seeking help and desperate to find a way out.

Here’s a very long trailer (actually the first five minutes of the film):

Like I said, this is nothing you haven’t seen done a hundred times before, but #ALIVE is well made, fast-paced, and enjoyable. The two leads, Ah-In Yoo as Oh Joon-woo and Shin-Hye Park as Kim Yoo-bin, deliver decent performances and make the most of the material. The film reminded me a lot of THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD in terms of the overall set-up and feel, though it has only a fraction of the depth and impact of NIGHT.

If you’re here for bloody zombie action, though, you’ll be satisfied with #ALIVE. The undead (or infected or whatever) are gory and freaky enough and appear in large enough numbers to add some real excitement and tension to the action scenes.

I was particularly pleased to see one of my favourite zombie tropes at play here (slight spoilers ahead): the traumatised survivor who can’t bring themselves to let go of their obviously deceased family member. I’ve always found that to be a particularly unsettling plot twist, and long-time readers will remember the character of poor old Philip Evans from the first AUTUMN novel. Philip was one of the few highlights of the 2009 AUTUMN movie, not least because the role was played by the incredible DAVID CARRADINE in his final screen performance. No matter what you thought about the rest of the film, Carradine’s five minutes are worth the price of admission alone. Behind the scenes pic below.

Back to #ALIVE, and I don’t have much more to say other than if you’re in the mood for a well put together, relatively straightforward zombie flick, it’s well worth your time. Right now we can all identify with the themes of isolation and living through a pandemic. #ALIVE steers well away from the doom and gloom of reality and delivers an exciting and surprisingly positive and uplifting tale.

#ALIVE is currently streaming on Netflix worldwide.

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Return of the Living Dead

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that I’ve had a little trouble working recently. We lost our family cat, Tom, early on in lockdown, and our new kitten arrived this week. Lovely as he is, when everyone else went out and I was left cat-sitting, young Milo prevented me from doing anything constructive other than catching up with the latest issue of SCREAM MAGAZINE (which happens to contain a fantastic 5-star review of THE BLEED: RUPTURE – thanks Scream team).

One of the things I love most about SCREAM is the fact it spends as much time looking back as it does forward: as well as up-to-date news and reviews, the mag always also features articles on classic (and sometimes no so classic) horror movies. This issue has an excellent retrospective article on THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. So, stuck with the new cat, and with little prospect of getting any writing done, I decided a re-watch of RETURN was in order. And as I realised I’d never properly written about it for this site, I decided to put that right too.

When foreman Frank (James Karen) shows new employee Freddy (Thom Mathews) a secret military experiment in a supply warehouse, the two klutzes accidentally release a gas that reanimates corpses into flesh-eating zombies. As the epidemic spreads throughout Louisville, and the creatures satisfy their hunger in gory and outlandish ways, Frank and Freddy fight to survive with the help of their boss (Clu Gulager) and a mysterious mortician (Don Calfa).

I’m sure you know this already, but here’s a little background on RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. It’s written by John A. Russo, who co-wrote the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD with George Romero. When he and Romero parted ways, a legal agreement allowed Romero to continue making “…of the Dead” zombie films, while Russo’s films had to be titled “…of the Living Dead”. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD was originally intended as a serious, straight-up sequel to NIGHT, and whilst it is still indelibly connected to the Romero classic, it’s completely different tonally. It’s hilarious.

Hard to believe that RETURN is 35 years old. Before re-watching it this week, I don’t think I’d seen it since the 1990’s. I was expecting it to have dated horrifically and, in many ways, it had, and yet I was surprised by how downright funny the film still is. Think zombie comedy, and many people will probably think of SHAUN OF THE DEAD (I’m not at all a ZOMBIELAND fan, sorry). SHAUN is also a classic, and I think it shares a reason for its success with RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. At their heart, both films are well made zombie movies that tell familiar, well-trod stories. Both films also feature a cast of idiots. There’s a subtle (yes, subtle – bear with me) point to be made here; the joke’s on the living, not the dead. And this is why I’m not a ZOMBIELAND fan… finding ever more ‘hilarious’ ways to despatch a reanimated corpse is nowhere near as much fun as watching a group of morons trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. And the morons in RETURN really are first-class idiots.

The cast is pretty much perfect; an intriguing mix of unknowns and horror stalwarts. And it’s the interplay between them that makes the movie a joy to watch. In particular, Thom Matthews, James Karen and Clu Gulager are exceptional as the completely inept workers and boss of the medical supply warehouse. The scenes where Fred and Frank come clean about what they’ve done and what’s happened as a result are priceless. They’re ably supported by a bunch of punks and preppies and misfits who’d probably be happier killing each other than getting rid of zombies. Special mention has to be made of Linnea Quigley as Trash – a nihilistic punk who’s fascinated with a) death, b) sex, and c) taking off her clothes. Her appearance in this film deeply affected many young men of a certain age when the first was first released. Me included.

There was a lot of talent behind the camera too. The film was directed by Dan O’Bannon, who many people will remember as the writer of several genre classics (and no-so classics) including ALIEN, DEAD & BURIED, BLUE THUNDER, TOTAL RECALL and LIFEFORCE. Much has been made of O’Bannon’s inexperience behind the camera and the uncomfortable relationship he had with his cast, and you can’t help thinking this awkwardness might have contributed to the eventual feel of the film. There’s a definite clash between the punks and the establishment, with them both being undone by the living dead.

Production designer was Bill Stout, an artist with a background in comics and fantasy art. Though the living dead in the film are largely generic, particularly in crowd scenes, Stout takes credit for two classic zombies – the astonishing Tar Man, and the truncated (and badly decayed) dead woman, complete with a severed spinal cord that thrashes around wildly on the autopsy table.

If you haven’t seen RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD yet (surely you must have by now?) then can I recommend you put that right. It’s great entertainment, and even though it’s ridiculous and plays fast and furious with Romero’s original zombie rules, it still manages to work as a quasi-sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. It’s a lot of fun throughout, right the way to the surprisingly bleak and laugh-free final scene. A number of sequels followed, though I’d recommend you stop after number three.

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An AUTUMN update

Hi everyone. I wanted to give you a quick update on my progress with the new AUTUMN novels. They’re coming along nicely, but I’ve had a couple of major interruptions since I announced them earlier this year (namely the onset of a global pandemic swiftly followed by a heart attack), and it’s become clear that I’m not going to make the October release I’d originally scheduled for AUTUMN: DAWN. Apologies.

I’m hoping that AUTUMN: DAWN will now be released in April 2021, with the other books in the new trilogy – INFERNO and EXODUS – following in quick succession. It’s been an absolute blast returning to the world of AUTUMN after nearly a decade away, and though the new books will be very different on a number of levels, the same bleak tone and the overwhelming scale of the apocalypse feels just as it did when I started writing the first book back in 1997. If you’ve not read the original books, you can find a huge amount of information and stacks of free AUTUMN short stories at www.lastoftheliving.net.

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