David Moody's Blog, page 32

Reviews and interviews

Publishers Weekly have had their say on CHOKEHOLD. Considering it’s the sixth book in a six book series (which technically takes place after books two and five and before three – make sense of that if you can), I’m more than happy with this write-up. CHOKEHOLD was never going to be a jumping-on point for the casual HATER series reader! Warning – spoilers ahead.

In Moody’s blood-soaked third Final War novel, Matthew Dunne and a handful of fellow survivors emerge from an underground bunker into a nuclear-blasted Britain still overrun with vicious, rage-fueled Haters, transformed humans whose overriding need is to kill Unchanged people like Matt. Beaten down and exhausted, Matt only wants to be left alone, but he’s drawn back into the fight when he and his group are taken to a fortified compound run by an old acquaintance, Estelle Bisseker, commanding officer of the Civil Defense Force. Estelle is eager to take the Haters down once and for all, but she’s not prepared for a massive cell of Haters that’s primed to wipe out the last of the Unchanged. When Matt spots a Hater in their midst, no one believes him, and he’s drugged, only to awaken to carnage. Matt sets out to find the rest of the group and warn them of the impending bloodbath. Moody toggles between the perspectives of the Haters and the Unchanged, eschewing nuance and peppering Matt’s harrowing journey with brutal fights that pave the way for all-out final battles. Fans of exceedingly bleak survival horror will be satisfied. 

And here are a couple of other mentions I’d like to share. SFBOOK recently posted a great review of ALL ROADS END HERE, and I was interviewed by Todd of LONG SHOT BOOKS here. Finally, I recently recorded a huge (three hour!) podcast for THIS IS HORROR on independent publishing, mainstream publishing, and everything in-between. I’ll let you know as soon as it goes live.

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The Night Eats the World

Well this one came from out of nowhere and blew me away. Its release last year passed me by, and it’s only thanks to a casual mention of the title by a friend and coming across the movie whilst browsing Netflix that I watched it. And I’m so glad I did. I thought it was a fascinating study of loneliness – something that’s considered less and less in many twenty-first century post-apocalyptic films. The concept of being the last person left alive on the planet is something that used to be a staple of end of the world stories (with I AM LEGEND being an obvious example), and yet in today’s increasingly (superficially) interconnected society, it feels like an inevitable by-product of the apocalypse which isn’t discussed as often as I’d expect.

In THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD our main character Sam is already alone. We meet him as he makes a return visit to his ex-partner’s flat in Paris – filled with people, noise and good times – hoping to collect the last of his belongings. He wants to get in and out fast but is persuaded to stay, and as a result of the booze he consumes to help him get through the obvious awkwardness of the situation, he passes out. When he wakes up next morning, the walls of the flat are covered in blood. He’s slept through the zombie apocalypse.

So far, so cliched. As I said at the outset, this film took me completely by surprise. It won’t be to everyone’s tastes that’s for sure; a quick glance at some of its polarized reviews shows that all many reviewers see is a miserable man trapped in a flat! For me, though, it’s immeasurably more than that. First and foremost, I think that’s because of its simplicity and directness. It’s a straightforward, uncomplicated story, mirroring the straightforward and uncomplicated life of Sam. We’re on his side from the get-go, and it’s clear from the opening scenes that his life has been moving at a very different speed to the rest of the world. You get the feeling he’s been left behind. Overtaken.

Anders Danielsen Lie’s subdued performance as Sam does much to carry the story along. He’s my kind of hero (and what I mean by that is he’s not a hero at all). He’s a victim of circumstance, and he does his best with the few opportunities that are presented to him. There’s no time wasted thinking about what’s caused the apocalypse, and little consideration given to finding out the scale of what’s happened or looking for survivors. All Sam wants is to stay alive. He befriends a zombie trapped in a lift-shaft and risks his life to save a kitten. Seriously – if you’re looking for large-scale action sequences here, you’re going to be disappointed.

What is to be found, though, is a convincing portrayal of a guy who’s been dealt a few bad hands, being dealt one more. He’s been knocked down so many times he can’t remember how to get back up. He makes the most of the little he has, gradually checking the other apartments for supplies in the prison-like block where he’s found himself incarcerated, and shutting the door on undead neighbours in preference to having to deal with them.

In these brief write-ups of zombie movies, I like to mention the effectiveness of the living dead themselves. I’m pleased to report that the creatures here are phenomenal. Physically, they’re not much to look at, but in terms of their physicality, they’re off the scale. They’re quick, random, vicious, spasming creatures, and their movements and intent couldn’t be more of a contrast to our self-absorbed, lethargic hero. They move as a pack, as a herd; yet another stark contrast with singular Sam.

THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD is directed by Dominique Rocher from a novel by Pit Agarmen. I’m deliberately underselling the film, because there are some twists and plot shifts that I didn’t see coming which elevate it into something special. If you have a Netflix account and a spare ninety-or-so minutes, I thoroughly recommend it. No Netflix? I believe it’s on Amazon Prime in some locations and is also available on DVD.

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My return to AUTUMN

As you may have heard me say previously, I’m planning a return to the world of AUTUMN next year with two new novels. My aim is that one, if not both of them will be released around October 2020 – the 10 year anniversary of the mass-market release of the first book through St Martin’s Press. There’s a lot of work to be done yet, though, so don’t hold me to that release date. You know how reliable I am with deadlines…

In readiness for the new books I’m planning a number of initiatives to raise the profile of the original novels again, and the first part of that project is now complete. Last week saw the Infected Books re-release of the German language editions of the novels, originally published by Michael Krug of Otherworldverlag. Here are the new editions. I’m very happy with how they’ve turned out.

The books are available now in print and as ebooks from Amazon.de. As you can see, the entire original series is also available as a single German-language ebook for the first time. Huge thanks to Michael Krug for helping me make this happen, and for Craig Paton who allowed me to use some of his original Amy Steadman AUTUMN artwork for the covers.

More AUTUMN-related news coming soon.

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Pan’s Labyrinth

If, when my time is up, I’m ever asked to look back and recall pivotal moments in my life, the key writing-related moment I’d cite involves PAN’S LABYRINTH. It was 2006, and I’d just published HATER independently through Infected Books. The release had gone pretty well, and I was happy with how the book had been received. Then, out of the blue, I received an email from a production company in Los Angeles, enquiring about the availability of the film rights. Within a couple of weeks I was speaking to Mark Johnson (who went on to produce BREAKING BAD) about his vision for a film version of HATER. He asked me if I’d seen PAN’S LABYRINTH. I told him I had, and that I thought it was incredible. He said that was a relief, because he was hoping to get Guillermo del Toro to direct HATER.

Of course, as is often the way, things didn’t work out as planned. Del Toro became involved in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of THE HOBBIT and switched roles to produce HATER, only for the project to stall at a later stage. Even now, more than a decade later, I still get goosebumps thinking about how close we came to a del Toro adaptation of one of my books. And I know this post will inevitably result in folks asking questions about the current position of the HATER movie, so I’ll give you my stock answer: I had a meeting with the producer a week or so ago and the project is still very much alive and kicking. The script is in great shape and we’re just waiting for the stars to align. I’ll share more news the very second I’m able to.

Back to PAN’S LABYRINTH. It’s an astonishing film which rightly deserved the critical acclaim it received on release. Now, many years later, del Toro and author Cornelia Funke have adapted the story into a novel and, thanks to the publisher, I was recently able to read a copy. When I heard about the book I was concerned, and I struggled to understand why the story needed to be retold. Having read it, though, I totally get it. Remind yourself of the beauty of the film then read on below for my thoughts.

It’s 1944 and the Allies have invaded Nazi-held Europe. In Spain, a troop of soldiers are sent to a remote forest to flush out the rebels. They are led by Capitan Vidal, a murdering sadist, and with him are his new wife Carmen and her daughter from a previous marriage, 11-year-old Ofelia. Ofelia witnesses her stepfather’s sadistic brutality and is drawn into Pan’s Labyrinth, a magical world of mythical beings.

When I wrote about del Toro’s Oscar-winning THE SHAPE OF WATER a while back, I talked about how, in my opinion, he occupies a unique position as a mainstream director; as comfortable and successful making films with the outrageous bombast of HELLBOY I and II and PACIFIC RIM as he is telling smaller-scale emotional stories like THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE. In many ways I feel like PAN’S LABYRINTH is where the two sides of del Toro collide. You’d be hard pushed to find a film of his with more startling and memorable imagery (witness the iconic faun and the nightmarish pale man), and yet at its heart this is the tale of a young girl simply trying to survive in the kind of world no child should ever have to experience.

Growing up at the end of the Cold War in the 1980’s, I remember how the uncertainty and fear weighed heavy on everyone. As a kid, you accept it as normal because you know no different and it’s only later as an adult, looking back, that I can begin to appreciate the impact the constant fear of impending Armageddon had on everyone. I can only begin to imagine the psychological damage experienced by children in actual war zones. How does a child cope with such trauma? Do they cope at all? It’s eminently plausible that they’d withdraw into fantasy worlds where the lines between reality and dreams are indistinct, just as Ofelia does in PAN’S LABYRINTH.

If you haven’t seen the film, I recommend you put that right as soon as possible (here in the UK it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime). It’s violent, bloody, thought-provoking, tragic, beautiful and delicate (and it’s not often you get to use all those words to describe a single movie).

And what about the novel? Well, for me it was a revelation. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Funke’s deceptively simply prose is fairy tale-like and yet it still manages not to pull any punches in its description of the horrors of war and the personal nightmare which young Ofelia’s life has become. There’s an element of horror to much folklore, fable and myth, yet here the terrors of the tasks the faun sets Ofelia to complete pale into insignificance against the backdrop of the girl’s real-life family upheaval and the ongoing struggles of a dogged group of resistance rebels fighting the Spanish army.

The novel is also able to dive deeper into the backstory of the faun and the labyrinth, with a series of interconnected short tales that add a welcome level of detail to the mythological aspects of the story. This additional material fits perfectly with the tone of the original film’s storytelling. It’s like these stories were always there, but they’re only now being revealed to us.

I wholeheartedly recommend both the film and the book of PAN’S LABYRINTH. They compliment each other, with the book adding another level of emotion to Ofelia’s beautiful, yet tragic story. It’s an unforgettable collision of innocence and sheer brutality.

The film is available at all the usual outlets, whilst you can also pick up the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository and all good bookstores.

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Tim Lebbon’s THE SILENCE

I’m sure you know Tim. He’s a very prolific, very approachable writer whose written many original novels as well as TV and movie tie-in books (including STAR WARS, ALIEN and FIREFLY). I’d known him for a while through social media then met him in person for the first time at a horror convention in Birmingham in February last year. We were table-neighbours for a very enjoyable weekend and, as is the done thing, we book-swapped at the end of the event. He went home with a copy of HATER, and I chose THE SILENCE.

I’d long known that a film adaptation of Tim’s book was in development, and we talked quite a bit about it over the weekend. Fast-forward a few weeks and I was on holiday. I devoured THE SILENCE (and thoroughly enjoyed it) in the space of a few short hours at the poolside. I was really interested to see how the film adaptation stacked up. Jump forward in time again until April this year, and THE SILENCE appeared on NETFLIX accompanied by a huge wave of publicity.

I’ve been stung by having one of my books adapted into a less-than-satisfactory movie, and I’m always nervous for fellow writers I know when films of their works are in the pipeline. So how did THE SILENCE stack up?

When the world is under attack from terrifying creatures who hunt their human prey by sound, 16-year old Ally Andrews (Kiernan Shipka), who lost her hearing at 13, and her family seek refuge in a remote haven.

It’s a real shame that great swathes of the moviegoing public appear incapable of distinguishing between different films with wildly different stories but which have a similar central conceit. A couple of months since THE SILENCE appeared on Netflix, and pretty much every review or comment I’ve read since then seems to have focused on the fact that A QUIET PLACE also featured a family with a deaf child trying to survive in a world ruled by creatures that react to sound. It’s made even more frustrating by the fact that Tim’s book was released in 2015, long before A QUIET PLACE appeared.

THE SILENCE takes place in the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse. In the novel, a massive swarm of predatory creatures – vesps – are released from the cave system where they’ve lived blind for thousands of years. Perhaps my favourite part of the book are the early scenes where the massively multiplying swarms of vesps steadily work their way around the globe, wiping out country after country. There’s something undeniably unsettling about a slow-moving approaching apocalypse: the inevitability ramps up the tension and adds different pressures to the plight of the central characters (Nevil Shute’s ON THE BEACH is a classic example of this). Unfortunately, the movie adaptation of THE SILENCE does away with much of this preamble, and it suffers as a result. We’re less invested in the family and their relationships than we are in the book.

Still, both the book and the film rattle on at an energetic pace as the family flee from everyone else (because you’re never going to survive a sound-related apocalypse if you’re stuck alongside millions of other escaping refugees and, as in the movie, if the military are trying to destroy swarms of hundreds of thousands of monsters which react to noise with bombs and jets!). All joking apart, I’m a sucker for apocalyptic stories which deal with the widescale loss of one of the senses. It emphasises just how much we rely on all our faculties to help us communicate and, therefore, to stay alive. Just try doing anything at all without making a noise… it’s virtually impossible, and the simplest of tasks become complex ordeals.

The film matches many of the beats of Tim’s novel, and though the story has been transplanted from the UK to the USA, little is lost in translation. The cast, in particular Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka and Miranda Otto, do a good job. Deafness is an easier affliction to convey in prose than on film, because as writers we spend a huge amount of time inside the heads of our characters and it’s easier to tell a reader what our character is thinking than it is a viewer. The power of THE SILENCE movie is reduced dramatically because the closeness of the viewer’s bond with deaf Ally is nowhere near as tight or as strong as in the novel. We care less than we should – less than we do in Tim’s book.

When all’s said and done, both the book and the movie are well worth your time. It’s a shame, though, that whilst THE SILENCE is a great apocalyptic novel, this adaptation is just a decent apocalyptic movie. It’s also a disappointment that it premiered after the huge success of A QUIET PLACE and was, in my opinion, unfairly criticised as a result.

THE SILENCE is available now to stream on NETFLIX and it’s definitely worth a watch. But I’d recommend picking up the book first.

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Advance copies of Chokehold are in!

It’s always a thrill to hold the first print copies of a book, and this one is especially cool. CHOKEHOLD is the absolute final HATER novel. It’s a sequel to both DOG BLOOD and ALL ROADS END HERE, and a prequel to THEM OR US. Oh, and it’s a bloody, violent, brutal (and surprisingly uplifting) story. Copies will be on their way to reviewers shortly. You can pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Book Depository and all the other usual sources now. The book is published by St Martin’s Press and it hits the shelves on 19 November.

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Here Alone

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of catching up with my friend WAYNE SIMMONS. Wayne’s good, by the way, as a lot of you have been asking. Slightly more tattooed and bearded than you might remember, but he’s as chilled out and positive as ever. He fell out of love with the horror genre several years ago, and we’ve barely talked about it since. So imagine my surprise when he came up with a few zombie movie recommendations out of the blue. Today’s recommendation is one of those films, and it’s a movie I hadn’t heard of until Wayne told me about it. HERE ALONE is a minimalist, slow-burn horror which is well worth a couple of hours of your time.

A young woman struggles to survive on her own in the wake of a mysterious epidemic that has killed much of society, and forced her deep into the unforgiving wilderness.

You can categorise zombie movies in many ways – those that take place in the middle of the apocalypse or later in the post-post-apocalypse; big-budget, effects-heavy studio movies or low-fi indie efforts; action-packed or contemplative. HERE ALONE is definitely the latter of all of these. It focuses on Ann, a lone survivor who has lost her family to the inevitable zombie infection, and who exists in solitude. The weight of (what’s left of her) world is on Ann’s shoulders, and there’s no question that she’s struggling with that most fundamental question of post-apocalyptic life: I’m surviving, but is there anything worth surviving for? The movie picks up on a theme which I find fascinating and which I touched on a number of times through the AUTUMN series – as time moves on from the point of infection, the differences between the living and the dead steadily reduce. Eventually they’re all reduced to simply existing.

At the centre of this movie is an absolutely excellent performance by Lucy Walters as Ann. Everything she used to be before the apocalypse has steady been stripped away, and now she has a zombie-like existence in her isolated camp in a forest by a lake. Her home is the mud-covered shell of her family car. She picks grubs out of rotting tree trunks with her knife. She coats herself with mud when she goes out hunting for food, and she collects her own urine to use as a disinfectant and zombie-repellant. You get the idea: she’s good at this.

But living has clearly come at a substantial cost, and when two more survivors appear, she’s faced with a choice. Continue this solitary existence and be relatively safe, or engage with these people and start to remember who she used to be.

Director Rod Blackhurst and writer David Ebeltoft have crafted a taut and visually impressive film here. There are occasions when it drags and times when the dialogue is repetitive, but that can be overlooked. The present day events are dovetailed with glimpses of Ann’s past and the fate of her family, and whilst the switch is sometimes jarring, the payoff is rewarding. There’s nothing much here we haven’t seen before, but HERE ALONE is performed and produced with style and it’s well worth your time. Go and watch it. It’s streaming on Netflix and available from Amazon etc.

And what of my friend Wayne? Who knows. He’s in a good place and is very happy with his lot. Maybe he’ll write something again one day? Maybe not. If you’ve not come across his work before, or you missed it first time around, can I recommend his last release – a cracking science-fiction/horror yarn called XINNERS. It’s one of my great disappointments that more people didn’t pick up this book, because it’s a blast. Literally. I can best sum it up by quoting the working title: ZOMBIES IN SPACE. Who could ask for more?!

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Free audiobooks

As you may know, I’ve been working hard over the last few months with some very talented narrators to make my Infected Books back catalogue available as audiobooks. I have a load of free download codes available which I’d like to give away. Want one? Fill in the form below.

All I ask in return is that you listen to the books and help me spread the word, ideally by sharing on social media or writing a review. There are three titles available – STRANGERS, THE COST OF LIVING and STRAIGHT TO YOU. Enjoy!

UPDATE – 7 JUNE 06:00 – DUE TO OVERWHELMING DEMAND I’VE HAD TO SUSPEND THIS OFFER. ALL CODES HAVE BEEN TAKEN. THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST!

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Fresh Garbage

Joseph D’Lacey is a pal who writes great books that have never really had the success they deserved. I’ve told you about a couple of them before. Joseph is now releasing some of his earlier titles through his own imprint – Phasmid. He recently asked me to write an introduction for the re-release of GARBAGE MAN – a book I enjoyed first time around, and which I loved when I re-read it recently. The new edition has been launched this week, and for the next 24 hours it’s free to download from Amazon. Please do that straight away!

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Radio Silence

I get very jittery when I don’t post here for a while (I worry you’ll forget about me!) so this is me coming up for air to say a brief hello. Lots going on in the background as usual, all of which I’ll tell you about in due course. I’m neck-deep in a new novel at the moment, which is proving to be a real challenge as it’s like nothing I’ve written before.

Last week I re-read CHOKEHOLD to complete the final edits, and I really enjoyed it. I hope you will too (it’s released on 19 November). I think it ties the first and second HATER trilogies together nicely, and it does so in a way I don’t think you’ll be expecting.

The picture above is included as evidence that words are still being written and progress continues to be made. I’ve got a backlog of news about foreign language editions, audiobooks, new projects, film and book recommendations, and re-releases of old novels by friends which I’m looking forward to sharing with you soon.

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