David Moody's Blog, page 38

Mutant kids and Nazi zombies

My friend CRAIG DILOUIE released a new book earlier this month. Craig and I go a long way back and I consider him one of the most interesting voices in genre fiction. You can read my thoughts on his earlier releases TOOTH AND NAIL and SUFFER THE CHILDREN in the archives of this site. What I love about his work is the way he’ll take an extraordinary premise and write about it in a detached yet personal way which pulls no punches. He takes world-changing events like the military response to a fast moving zombie infection or a virulent strain of vampirism which affects only children, and looks at them in a whole new light, often making them feel uncomfortably plausible. His latest release ONE OF US (out now from Orbit) is no exception. It takes the well-used set-up of mutant kids born with special powers, but instead of going down the tired and cliched X-Men superhero route, he instead tells a much darker and altogether more disturbing story of neglect, distrust and hatred.

THEY CALL IT THE PLAGUE –  A generation of children born with extreme genetic mutations

THEY CALL IT A HOME –  But it’s a place of neglect and forced labour

THEY CALL HIM A FREAK –  But Dog is just a boy who wants to be treated as normal

THEY CALL THEM DANGEROUS –  They might be right

The story of a lost generation, and a boy who just wants to be one of us.

I thoroughly enjoyed ONE OF US. Set in Georgia in an alternate 1984, it’s a fascinating read. As you’d expect, the grotesques aren’t the real monsters here, rather it’s DiLouie’s cast of prejudiced, cruel, moralistic non-mutants. For me, what sets this story apart is the masterstroke of having the deformed and mutated kids being born as the result of a new strain of sexually transmitted disease. Because this is a generational shift, it allows DiLouie to present us with a cast of ‘special’ kids who grow up together and who therefore both lose their innocence and mature/gain their powers at the same time. This effectively amplifies the problem facing the backward facing society from which the children have been ostracised, and you get the sense from the very beginning of the book that once these kids are fully in control of their destinies, things will never be the same again. Highly recommended.

But ONE OF US isn’t the only Craig DiLouie release I want to tell you about. I’m also very excited to announce that his entry in THE FRONT series – following SCREAMING EAGLES by Tim Long and my novel RED DEVILS – will be released on 31 August. I’ve had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of the book and it definitely doesn’t disappoint. BERLIN OR BUST is a cracking tale which takes us right into the rotting black heart of the undead Nazi war machine. You can pre-order it now.

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Hot and getting hotter…

The weather’s been unprecedented here in the UK recently, with temperatures in the high to mid-twenties every day now for a number of weeks. Apparently we have a couple more weeks of it to look forward to. I’m not complaining – apart from the fact it’s bloody lovely to have a decent summer for the first time in years, it’s also fun to see the effect that a heatwave has on book sales. Whenever the sun appears, STRAIGHT TO YOU has a sales spike.

For those who’ve not read the book, it’s a simple story of a man trying to get to his wife before the sun dies and burns the planet to a crisp. The novel has quite a history to it: it was my first novel but I grew to hate it so rewrote it 20 years later, and it almost kind of nearly reached the big screen. It’s also one of the novels I’m proudest of having written (the 2014 version, anyway).

The novel is currently free to read on WATTPAD, and they recently made it a featured story. If you’ve not yet read it, head on over and give it a go. For maximum impact though, grab a paperback version, lie on your back in the middle of one of the UK’s many parched public parks, and read it before the weather breaks!

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Xinners

I’m back from the wilderness temporarily to tell you about the latest Infected Books release. It’s a hugely enjoyable, balls-to-the-wall, gore-filled tale of dodgy dealings and reanimated corpses in the outer rim. As it says in the blurb: it’s Dawn of the Dead meets Battle Beyond the Stars: Romero meets Corman. XINNERS, by my good friend and co-conspirator Wayne Simmons, is a cracking read and it’s available right now from Amazon. It’s zombies in space, man! Need I say more?

A proportion of the profits from every copy of XINNERS sold will be donated to MIND, the mental health charity.

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Fresh blood required

I’ve had a few quiet years but I’m hopeful that you’ll be seeing a lot more of me in the near future. There are a number of very exciting projects in the pipeline. A great way of keeping up to date with my news would be to sign up for my newsletter, and you can find all the necessary details over here. And yes, before you ask, I’m GDPR compliant. Here’s a link to the privacy policy.

For a long time I gave away a short story to new mailing list subscribers, but now I’ve upped the ante and produced HOW IT WORKS – a tongue in cheek guide to the inner workings of a typical horror author (me!). The book is available in Kindle and ePub formats, and also as a pdf. As well as a biography, frequently asked questions, and a guide to all my current novels, it also contains SCRATCH – the dystopian zombie novella I wrote for Infected Books’ YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE series.

The ebook is designed as a primer for people who are new to my work, so feel free to pass it on to anyone you think might be interested. Chances are if you’re reading this you’re already well versed in my work, but as the title of this post implies, I’m on the lookout for fresh blood…!

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Welcome to Essex

Here’s a film recommendation I’ve waited a long time to share. Before I tell you why you should see WELCOME TO ESSEX, let’s wind the clock back a few years…

I’ve mentioned Ryan J. Fleming on this site several times previously. As well as being a connoisseur of all things post-apocalyptic (a number of the film releases I’ve written about here have been direct recommendations from Ryan), he’s also a roving reporter, a long-time member of MOODY’S SURVIVORS, and he even had a starring role as a featured zombie in AUTUMN: AFTERMATH. We can now add film director to that list.

It feels like decades, but it can only have been a few years ago when Ryan told me he was making a film. In this business it’s often hard to have a conversation with anyone who isn’t desperate to tell you they’re writing a book, editing an anthology, working on a screenplay, or directing their first movie. Much of the time these comments are just pipe-dreams or wishful thinking. In Ryan’s case, however, it happened to be true.

Over the following years, he told me about assembling a crowd of more than a thousand zombie extras for a scene in Brentwood High Street, about naming a character (actually a character’s husband) after me (no doubt as payback for AFTERMATH), and about Russell Brand appearing in the film. In 2013 (I think), attendees at the HORROR IN THE EAST convention in Lowestoft actually saw some footage, and we realised he wasn’t just making it all up.

Fast-forward five years, and Ryan’s debut feature – WELCOME TO ESSEX – is finally out on DVD. I’ve had the pleasure of watching it, and I can tell you it was definitely worth the wait. I’m not going to review it here, I’m just going to ask you to support Ryan and his team and pick up a copy. Here’s the customary synopsis and trailer:

Overnight, the United Kingdom was consumed by an epidemic of terrifying proportions. The majority of the population were killed in a matter of hours as millions of recently-dead people returned to life and began to attack and kill the living. The disaster spread so rapidly that the government had no time to control the situation. The order to evacuate England was given. But it was too late. Now, the following day, a small group of mismatched survivors find themselves trapped in the famous town of Brentwood, hunted by large hordes of fast-moving corpses. They must learn to work together and reach the last-known point of rescue, Southend-on-Sea, or face certain death. Or worse.

What I love most about WELCOME TO ESSEX is the fact that it exists. The fact that a gent who passionately loves the post-apocalyptic genre can have the desire to make a movie, and the determination and conviction to make it happen. And on such a scale… this film looks the business and everything Ryan promised eventually appeared on screen, including a thousand zombie extras and Russell Brand. Okay, so it’s not the most original horror movie you’ll see this year, but it’s funny (often very, very funny), technically impressive, and filled with more passion and heart than a hundred Hollywood blockbusters combined. Congratulations to Ryan, the team at Smoking Monkey Productions, and anyone involved in the film in any way, shape or form.

WELCOME TO ESSEX. Buy it. Watch it.

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Cargo

I feel duty bound to draw your attention to CARGO, a top-notch zombie movie which premiered on Netflix this last week. I’ve had my eye on this one for a long time, primarily because of its source material. The film’s based on a stunning short movie which took the zombie-loving world by storm back in 2013. You can watch it here, and I recommend you do. No worries about spoiling the feature length version, because they’re two very different beasts as I’ll explain.

Here’s a synopsis, courtesy of IMDB:

In a desperate bid to outrun a violent pandemic, Andy and Kay have holed up on a houseboat with their one-year-old daughter, Rosie. Their protected river existence is shattered by a violent attack, which sees Kay tragically die and Andy infected. Left with only 48 hours before he transforms into one of the creatures they have fought so long to evade, Andy sets out on a precarious journey to find a new guardian for his child. A flourishing Aboriginal tribe are Rosie’s best chance of survival – but with their merciless attitude toward the afflicted, they also pose a grave threat. A young Indigenous girl becomes Andy’s only chance of safe passage into this sacred community. But unfortunately the girl has no desire to return to her people – she is on a quest to cure her own infected father by returning his stolen soul. Each in their own way is seeking salvation… but they will need to work together if they hope to achieve it.

I absolutely loved the original CARGO short. It spoke volumes telling a relatively wordless story. It was smart, very well made, original and heartfelt. When I heard it was going to be expanded to feature length, I had reservations. My concerns were calmed when I heard that the original writing and directing team of BEN HOWLING and YOLANDA RAMKE were helming the new version, and also when MARTIN FREEMAN was cast. I still hold THE OFFICE as the best of Freeman’s performances to date, and I thought if he could bring the same laid back vulnerability to the role here, we could be onto a winner. In my opinion, he nails it.

I mentioned earlier that the CARGO short and feature are very different. Whilst the central concept is largely the same, the variations are inevitable. You can’t extend a 7 minute story to 104 minutes without adding a lot of content. I really started to consider the effects of story length when I wrote THE COST OF LIVING (several times). It started off as a 5k word short, then morphed into a piece of flash fiction, but it only really came into its own when I wrote it as a 40k word novella. You can judge for yourself which version you prefer because they’re all available to read here, but to my mind the story only really hit its stride with the novella version. I think CARGO suits the short film format best, but there’s a huge amount to admire in the longer film.

At times the extended story threatens to veer towards a reliance on various overused zombie tropes to keep itself going (in fact, the attack which sets the plot in motion is driven by a particularly dumb character decision), however the originality of the central conceit, the performances, and the sure-handed direction keep the movie moving well. The cinematography makes the most of Australia’s vast beauty and remoteness, with the glorious scenery almost becoming a character in its own right. It reminded me a little of THE ROVER, another post-apocalyptic film you should check out. A special mention must also be made of the infected. We’ve seen endless variations of the living dead and we’re becoming hardened to blood and guts and dismembered body parts. The creatures here, though, are something else. Their physicality is unsettling, bordering on surreal, and because they’re not given too much screen time, their impact when they do appear is increased.

This is a smart and very well made movie, which stands alongside – not in place of – its source material. As it appears to be on NETFLIX in most territories around the world, I’d like to propose you get off this website and go watch it. Then watch the short. Both are highly recommended.

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ALL ROADS END HERE – important update

Hello. Long time no speak. I’ve had my head down writing the final HATER book  – CHOKEHOLD – but I’m briefly coming up for air to bring you an important update about ALL ROADS END HERE.

On the whole, I’m pleased with how ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING has been received since its release last December. It’s still getting plenty of good press. Just this month, STARBURST magazine called it “a gripping, visceral read, glistening with gore and studded with extreme brutality and with a relentlessly downbeat tone which will please lovers of hard-edged apocalyptic fiction”, whilst SFBOOK REVIEW said it was “clever, convincing, claustrophobic fiction”. Just yesterday, GEEK SYNDICATE published their verdict, with Ian Simpson noting that by the end of the book “you’re likely to be standing in a pile of gore, or not standing at all.”

My publisher has been looking again at how we publish and market the second HATER trilogy, and we’ve decided that these are books which better suit a paperback release. ONE OF US… was hardcover only and is likely to stay that way until we’ve shifted more copies, but ALL ROADS END HERE and CHOKEHOLD will be released as paperbacks from the get-go.

In the case of ALL ROADS END HERE, this means that publication is going to be delayed, unfortunately. The book will now be released on February 12, 2019.

If you’ve pre-ordered the hardcover, please cancel your order. The paperback edition is already available for pre-order here.

Apologies for any inconvenience or disappointment. This is definitely the right approach for the series as a whole and I cannot wait for you to read the remaining books. In the meantime, can I suggest you re-read DOG BLOOD? You’ll be catching up with a few familiar faces in some unexpected places in ALL ROADS END HERE…

And again, I’m sorry you’ll have to wait to read the new book. Rest assured I’m working on something to cushion the blow, and I hope to announce an upcoming release for 2018 very soon.

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Look into the face of the monster

I am working hard to become a bona fide creature of horror. The picture below, ladies and gentleman, is a genuine attempt at a smile. I have developed Bell’s Palsy, and half of my face is currently paralysed. Like a half-hearted version of Two-Face from Batman, I can currently only raise one eyebrow and smile with half my mouth, but I can fix you with a hell of a withering stare from my (genuinely) unblinking left eye. I look an absolute bloody fright. Perfect horror movie fodder.

I’m currently in the middle of writing and planning and editing so haven’t had much to post about for a couple of weeks. I thought I’d take a moment to a). remind you all I’m still alive, and b). give you opportunity to laugh at my (hopefully temporarily) distorted mush. If the books dry up, I could always run away and join a freak show.

Genuine updates and announcements coming soon.

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Always happy to be compared to Carpenter’s THE THING…

Thanks to This is Horror for a great review of ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING. Rich Cosgrove was kind enough to write that “while sharing DNA with John Carpenter’s seminal The Thing in that it’s effectively a single location exercise in paranoia and mistrust, (One of Us…) is very much its own tale.

One Of Us Will Be Dead By Morning proves once again that David Moody is a significant talent in the UK horror scene, delivering a sharp, insightful study on what it means to feel isolated, not only geographically but socially, and reminding us how uncomfortably quick we are to mistrust and turn on our fellow human beings. If you even remotely like tales of societal breakdown or post-apocalyptic fiction, this book is essential reading.”

Without doubt my most polarising book to date, ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING is out now from St Martin’s Press. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository, Indiebound and all other good bookstores. Ebook available from Amazon, Kobo, iBooks and other stockists. Audiobook by Macmillan Audio available from Audible, Amazon and iTunes. Signed hardcovers available from Infected Books.

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Looking back at the AUTUMN movie

So, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the AUTUMN series a lot recently. AUTUMN was the first of my books which really took off. As you may recall, I gave it away free online between 2001 and 2008 (when, strange as it now seems, eBooks were rare and very few people were giving them away), and it was downloaded many hundreds of thousands of times. I wrote a series of sequels which were well received, and the first book was even adapted as an online full cast audio drama which you can still listen to.

But then HATER came along and my focus shifted. I then moved onto other books and projects, and it’s now a sobering five years since the last book – AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION – was released. Yet even now people still get in touch regularly to tell me how much they’ve enjoyed the series.

When I wrote the very first draft of the very first book, way back in 1997, no one was writing about zombies. Very few people were watching zombie movies, either. In fact, no one was paying zombies any attention in any way, shape or form. But in the years which followed, a totally unexpected thing happened and, for the first time, the living dead became mainstream. In films, Danny Boyle’s 28 DAYS LATER was a huge hit (which sparked endless pointless debate about whether zombies should run or not, and whether or not his infected were zombies at all), and Zack Synder’s remake of George Romero’s ground-breaking DAWN OF THE DEAD bucked the trend and proved that not all remakes were worthless cash-ins. THE WALKING DEAD comic was launched and a number of writers including myself, BRIAN KEENE and DAVID WELLINGTON precipitated the flood of zombie fiction.

And despite hearing rumours to the contrary every few months since then, the bubble hasn’t burst. People still love the living dead.

I’m going to write two more AUTUMN novels. There – I’ve said it out loud and in public now. I have an idea which I can’t stop thinking about and that, for me, is the acid test. If an idea for a book won’t go away, then that book needs writing. I have a couple of other projects to wrap up first, then I’ll dive straight into what I’m currently calling AUTUMN: DAWN. I don’t want to say too much at the moment, but I think the time’s right for these new books. As I’ve already said, the world has changed dramatically since I first wrote AUTUMN. To my mind, zombies have always been the ultimate story-telling device for allowing writers and film-makers to study the human condition. By turning people into something so similar yet inherently different, it enables us to look back and consider what makes us human in the first place. Socially we’re in a vastly different place now to where we were in 2001, and I think it’ll be fascinating to imagine how we’d react to the events of AUTUMN if they took place today. The new books won’t replace the original novels, nor will they undermine them. Same dead world, different people. Not a rehash or reboot. It’s funny… one of the rules of zombie fiction and movies when I first started writing was that the characters had to have an unspoken innocence and couldn’t know what a zombie was. Given the pop culture explosion I’ve just been talking about, there’s no way I could get away with that in the new AUTUMN books!

So what about the movie?

It was released in 2008 to a torrent of abuse and ill-feeling. It creaks and it groans. It was made on a shoestring budget and it shows. People either loved it or hated it (mostly they hated it). I stopped trying to defend it and used the backlash to try and promote the books, working on the dubious premise that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Tellingly, none of the publishers of the series around the world mentioned the film in their marketing, though an editor who worked on the books did once tell me that ‘it’s always better to have a bad film made of one of your books than no film at all’. And with hindsight, I think I agree. But how bad a film is it? Was all the negativity justified? This week I took a deep breath and watched AUTUMN from start to finish for the first time in a decade. And you know what? I really enjoyed it. I’m under no illusions, it’s not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t think it’s the absolute car crash that most people assume.

Here’s a trailer, and my thoughts follow. And yes, that is me on the DVD cover above.

I sold the film rights to AUTUMN within days of selling the rights to HATER. Back then I was young and green and I’d have pretty much sold anything to anyone. My logic was that since the two approaches were from some vastly different parts of the film industry, there was a good chance that one or other of the films would be made. The HATER rights went to Hollywood majors whereas RENEGADE MOTION PICTURES, the production company behind AUTUMN, was a small independent Canadian outfit. The film stars DEXTER FLETCHER as Michael, DICKON TOLSON as Carl, and genre legend DAVID CARRADINE as Philip Evans in one of his final movie roles.

The film follows the book closely and that, I think, is part of the problem. If you’ve not read AUTUMN, you might be under the impression that it’s a pretty straightforward zombie story and to an extent, it is. But there are some deviations from the norm, such as the absence of flesh-eating and the fact that there’s no ongoing worry about infection – you either die from the disease on page 1, book 1, or you don’t. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is that the zombies you come across in the first AUTUMN book are vastly different to those you’ll meet by the end of AUTUMN: AFTERMATH. The behaviour and appearance of the undead changes throughout the series. Over the course of five novels there’s plenty of space to document and ruminate on those changes, less so with a single ninety minute movie. On screen the behaviour of the reanimated corpses appears illogical and inconsistent, and if you’re not familiar with the source material, you’re going to be left scratching your head. The technical limitations of the film (and I’ll come onto that in a second) unfortunately adds to the confusion.

I’m credited as the co-writer of the screenplay of the film, but that’s not quite true. I wrote a spec script way, way, way back before there was ever any hint of a movie adaptation, and director STEVEN RUMBELOW used that and the novel as the basis for his script. Sadly Rumbelow died in 2016. I would love to have been able to sit down with him and discuss his take on the film a decade after release. He and I spoke on a number of occasions prior to filming beginning, and he discussed his plan to include a new character, Kyle, and an additional subplot. Kyle is a dick – there’s no polite way of putting it – and he was there to illustrate how abiding by the usual zombie movie survival clichés wouldn’t work in AUTUMN. Unfortunately, the character and his story added a further layer of complication to a film that already wasn’t as straightforward as much of its audience might initially have assumed.

Technically, the photography and lighting is poor, and there are some jarring edits and effects which become distracting and drag you out of the story. Again, these issues make following the story a challenge at times, particularly if you’re new to AUTUMN. The budgetary constraints also hamper the movie’s final scenes where thousands of reanimated corpses converging on a fortified farmhouse in the middle of nowhere was reduced to a bus load of extras being held back by a flimsy-looking picket fence.

But wait… go back a few paragraphs and you’ll see that I said I really enjoyed re-watching AUTUMN. So how come all I’ve done so far is pick fault?

My issues with the film are, as I’ve explained, pretty self-evident, and yet the entire movie has an uncomfortable, unnerving atmosphere that really works. It was made by some of the nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, who all gave 100% and who all understood the source material inside and out. The cast were phenomenal, and RANDY DAUDLIN and his makeup effects team did an excellent job, giving the zombies of AUTUMN a unique look. There’s also a wonderful interplay between Michael and Carl which adds weight to the choices they make, and despite Dexter Fletcher stating publicly that this film was one of the reasons he stepped away from acting and into directing, I think he’s on top form here.

Ultimately, though, I believe the film was a victim of its own ambition, and it was further hampered when David Carradine died just prior to release. The film was suddenly all over the internet and by the time a work print was leaked and savaged by the millions of people who downloaded it illegally, the die had been cast and the damage was done. Despite positive comments from sources including Empire Magazine and Ain’t it Cool News, it was never going to get a fair hearing.

Am I glad it was made? Yes. Am I still looking for a way of remaking it? Definitely. Do I still think the entire series could be the British TV answer to THE WALKING DEAD? One hundred per cent.

Some further reading for you. Here’s a set visit report from way back with some interesting thoughts and pictures. And if you’re unfamiliar with AUTUMN, here’s a series of articles I wrote about each of the books prior to the release of AFTERMATH: AUTUMN, AUTUMN: THE CITY, AUTUMN: PURIFICATION, AUTUMN: DISINTEGRATION and AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION.

One final thought for now… the producers and I have hardly received a penny from the profits of the film. Despite selling well on DVD and VoD around the world, all of the cash appears to be stuck with the distributors, SPOTLIGHT PICTURES and GREEN APPLE ENTERTAINMENT. The Spotlight website says their “reputation for service is outstanding and our accounting is pristine. We pay like clockwork and have excellent ongoing relationships, and friendships, with our producers” but in my experience I’d have to disagree. I’d love to be proved wrong, so if anyone from either firm happens upon this piece and would like to get in touch and provide a copy of their full accounting for AUTUMN, that would be just great.

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