David Moody's Blog, page 83

New edition of AUTUMN: DISINTEGRATION out today

The UK mass-market paperback edition of AUTUMN: DISINTEGRATION is released today by Gollancz. For those who missed it first time around, here’s the spiel:

“Forty days have passed since the end of the world began. Billions of people were killed in less than a day and now the entire world is rotting. Everything is disintegrating…  Survivors are few and far between in this deadly environment, and those who are still alive are forced to deal with a nightmare situation: the scale of the devastation is unprecedented. The shadowy landscape is swarming with the dead, their decaying bodies deteriorating day by day. Limited by their appalling physical condition, the only emotions they are able to display are anger, rage and hate and yet, remarkably, they are becoming more controlled. They are becoming self-aware, and they will defend themselves at all costs.

A group of eleven men and woman have managed to survive against the odds, protected by the geography of the land and sheltering in a derelict block of flats. They have been surrounded for weeks, but they have always been in control.  Until now. For the bodies are advancing. The situation is changing.”

I’ll talk more about the book in my ongoing AUTUMN retrospective very soon. In the meantime, I have a guest post today over at the brilliant Book Chick City where I talk about zombie preparedness, and how wondering how I’d cope with the living dead inspired me to write DISINTEGRATION. You’ll also find a great giveaway there – answer a (very) simple question for a chance to win one of three signed sets of the the first four AUTUMN novels courtesy of Gollancz.

I’ve got a few more guest posts lined up over the coming weeks, so please keep an eye out for them. Here’s one I twittered and facebooked about but didn’t mention here – an interview with My Bookish Ways from last weekend.

New edition of AUTUMN: DISINTEGRATION out today is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

AUTUMN: PURIFICATION

Once again, bear with me while I exorcise a few more AUTUMN memories. As with previous instalments, there may be spoilers here…

As I mentioned in last week’s post, by the time I’d finished writing the second AUTUMN novel, I was already plotting the third. THE CITY had opened up the story dramatically, and it was becoming clear to me that by killing off 99% of the population by the end of the first page of the first book, I’d given myself the mother of all blank canvases to work from. That said, AUTUMN: PURIFICATION was originally intended to be the end of the series, and it does bring the story of Michael, Emma and the other original survivors to a conclusion, albeit a temporary one.

THE CITY ended with all the major characters in one place (for the first time), trapped underground, and it would have been easy to write something along the lines of Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD. I knew I wanted to take AUTUMN in a very different direction, though, so I needed to get everyone out of the bunker they’d fought so hard to get into. I’d also started to take a fair amount of flack from people who weren’t at all impressed with my take on zombies. They didn’t like the idea of a zombie story without any flesh eating, divorced from many of the usual clichés of the genre. In response, I wanted to open the third book with a bang, hoping to demonstrate that even though my living dead creatures had started off relatively tame, they were now anything but!

I’d originally introduced the military into the second book for a number of reasons, primarily to subvert the usual ‘here come the soldiers to save the day’ expectations. I thought it would be far more interesting to portray the soldiers and their officers as a spent force, as helpless as the survivors on the surface, perhaps even more so because of their reliance on breathing equipment and hazmat suits to stay alive. The sheer volume of dead flesh amassing on the surface above them begins to cause real problems – blocking exhaust vents and the like – leaving the military leaders with no option but to order a cull of the bodies. And, in the best traditions of the genre, things don’t go to plan. Before long, the survivors are on the run again.

For me, the most important aspect of PURIFICATION was that, for the first time, I was able to think about the post-post-apocalypse: i.e. what happens when the initial threat to survival is dealt with, and the few people left behind start to pick up the pieces and rebuild. I originally wrote the book in 2004 and I became fascinated by the idea of what happens next, after the point when most films and books end. The length and scope of AUTUMN gave me room to experiment.

To add a more plausible slant to proceedings, if that’s at all possible in a zombie story, I took the decision to introduce a group of survivors aiming to repopulate the small, craggy, and entirely fictitious island of Cormansey. By moving the action to a more confined, relatively controllable location, with a finite dead population to deal with, it allowed the story to move on. The ‘harvest’, for want of a better word, of the dead on the island is as harrowing as you’d expect for the characters involved, and yet it proves to be strangely therapeutic in some ways. For the first time, they become aware of the massive void where their old lives used to be. Peter Guest typifies this when, after helping remove a host of bodies from the island’s village store, he finds a small toy similar to one his late son owned. It’s a small trigger, but it unlocks a huge amount of emotion in the man. Similarly, others look through glossy magazines and remember how the world used to be, how it’ll never be again. I’ll talk more about these themes when I get to AUTUMN: AFTERMATH next month.

I had an absolute blast writing PURIFICATION. The story flowed like never before, and I was able to introduce many new characters with the help of additional ECHOES. If you’ve read any of the interviews I’ve done over the years (or if you read last week’s AUTUMN: THE CITY feature), you’ll have probably seen that I used to work for a high street bank, managing staff in a processing centre in the middle of Birmingham. Last week I mentioned how that place was the inspiration for Donna Yorke’s office in the second AUTUMN novel (and more than a few of the zombies!), but the location played a part in the development of book three. The processing work we did at our centre was outsourced to similar –but much cheaper for the bank to run – sites overseas. Whilst the offer of relocation to Sri Lanka was there, it wasn’t something I seriously considered for more than half a second (not for a minimum three year term, and definitely not with a very young family). So I took redundancy along with a few thousand other folks around the country, and the bank was remarkably decent about it. We were given over a year’s notice and yet, within a few weeks of the announcement being made, work started to migrate away from our site. There then followed a bizarre period of several months when we were fully staffed yet underutilized. I took advantage to write a huge chunk of the first draft of PURIFICATION and many ECHOES whilst sitting at my desk!

In terms of the book’s locations, this time they were almost completely fictitious. That said, there’s one scene which takes place in a small school. It was based on the primary school which all my kids have attended (the youngest only left this summer just gone). It’s a great little school, tucked away from the road behind a church, and it was the ideal place for Jack, Donna, Clare and a couple of terrified soldiers to hole-up, having become separated from the rest of the convoy of survivors. The school itself made another unnamed appearance several years later in DOG BLOOD, the second HATER novel, as the school Danny McCoyne’s children attend. He returns there looking for Ellis, and finds the playground awash with blood and the classrooms inhabited by a pack of vicious, feral kids. It’s a lovely place really.

As always, to find out more, visit www.lastoftheliving.net. Come back here tomorrow for some AUTUMN: DISINTEGRATION goodness!

AUTUMN: PURIFICATION is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

Chapter 22 of TRUST

…is now online at www.trustdavidmoody.com.

Chapter 22 of TRUST is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

TRUST giveaway

You’ve just over a week left to enter the TRUST giveaway. To be in with a chance of winning one of three copies of the limited edition hardcover or a runners-up prize of one of three copies of the paperback, you just need to Tweet or post about the book (use the hashtag #trustdavidmoody or tag me so I can pick up your entry), follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or Goodreads (or invite your friends to), sign up for my mailing list, or write a review. Full details can be found in this post.

Chapter 21 of the novel is now available to read over at www.trustdavidmoody.com. It’s the calm before the storm. Everything changes next week…

TRUST giveaway is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

Tom Piccirilli

I’m guessing many of you will have heard that author Tom Piccirilli underwent surgery this week to remove a large brain tumour. According to an update from Brian Keene, although Tom made it through surgery, there have been some serious developments. Please see this post from Brian and, if you can, make a contribution.

Tom Piccirilli is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

A look back at AUTUMN: THE CITY

A brief disclaimer: as I’ve said previously, it feels pretentious to be writing a retrospective of my own books. I think I’m doing this for my own benefit more than anything else, so please bear with me. It’s some weird kind of personal therapy, I think…

For me, the writing process usually begins when I come up with an ending, then work my way back to the beginning of a story. Not so with the second AUTUMN novel. This time, just to be different, I began with the middle.

I’d been wondering what had happened to Michael and Emma after escaping the farm house at the end of the first book (it wasn’t until recently that I actually went back and filled in that part of their story – see BREAKING POINT over at www.lastoftheliving.net). I had visions of them quickly coming to the conclusion it would be too dangerous to stay in one place, and so electing to base themselves in a mobile home and move whenever the immediate danger became too great. But I knew that in order to move the overall AUTUMN story forward – and it was starting to feel like a much bigger story by that point – they’d need to interact with characters we hadn’t yet met. This meeting – whenever and with whomever – would have to happen almost a month after the initial infection, and yet I wanted these new characters to feel like people we already knew. The best option, I thought – though not necessarily the most obvious – was to rewind time and start from the beginning again.

AUTUMN: THE CITY begins with Donna Yorke watching the world fall apart from the ninth-floor office where she works. Elsewhere, Jack Baxter is travelling home from a night shift, when the driver of the bus he’s on dies at the wheel. Elsewhere, music store clerk Paul Castle watches helplessly as his customers and colleagues drop dead around him, and there’s nothing Dr Phil Croft can do to save any of the patients or staff dying on the hospital ward where he works.

The second AUTUMN book allowed me to open up the cast of characters and consider how vastly different people might (or might not) cope as the apocalypse unfolds around them. Until then I’d been perennially frustrated by the stereotypical characters inhabiting many other zombie books and films, and this was my chance to do something about it. By cramming together as many diverse survivors as possible – exactly as I’d imagine you’d find should a virulent killer virus strike a busy city centre – I was able to ask the kind of questions I hadn’t heard asked before: How would a young child survive alone? How would people from vastly different social backgrounds react when trapped together, desperate and terrified? How would someone who couldn’t speak a word of English cope in a foreign city as the world falls apart around them? What would happen to a baby conceived before but born post-infection?

It was here that the germ of the idea which became the AUTUMN: ECHOES series was born. It would have been impossible to provide full introductions to every character (where were you when the world ended?) without seriously derailing the novel, so I began to write their stories separately, starting with incidental characters like Sonya Farley and Sheri Newton. I’ll talk more about ECHOES and the collection THE HUMAN CONDITION which followed in a couple of weeks time.

I like the mix of survivors in THE CITY. Over the course of the AUTUMN series, survivors often comment on how the infection strips away all personality from the dead. Whether they were male or female, young or old… now they’re just the dead. The same is true of the survivors, though to a lesser extent. Whilst they still have their individual personalities, huge swathes of their pre-disaster lives have been rendered obsolete by Armageddon. They’re no longer teachers, doctors, secretaries, school kids, soldiers and the like; they’re just people, doing their best to survive the most dire of situations with very little information or help.

The second book takes place over a longer period of time than the first, and that enabled me to continue the development of the dead. It was here that their herding behaviours became clear, and where we started to get the distinct impression that though their bodies were deteriorating, their self-awareness was gradually beginning to improve. When I re-edited the first two books for the Thomas Dunne Books and Gollancz re-issues, I added a couple of extra scenes to flesh this out (pardon the pun). In AUTUMN that was the appearance of Veronica, a young survivor, at the community centre, and Michael and Carl’s subsequent trip out of the centre to find out why crowds of corpses are gathering outside. In AUTUMN: THE CITY, a university student, Sunita, pays a late-night visit to the student guild in search of cigarettes, and manages to attract the attention of a massive nest of bodies (and rats) in the process.

I’ll be completely honest, THE CITY is my least favourite of the AUTUMN books. That said, its release marked an important turning point for me. It was the first time I’d released a book independently and asked people to pay to read it. I didn’t know if anyone would, and I was amazed when, just a few minutes after the book appeared online, a few sales trickled in. I went away that weekend, and when I returned and found that the book had continued to sell steadily, I began to think I might be on to something…

Just to wrap this up, another word about locations. I mentioned Donna Yorke’s ninth-floor office – that was my office. I worked for a bank, managing a processing centre in the middle of Birmingham city centre, and it didn’t take much to start me thinking about zombies and the end of the world while I was at work!If you were to cross to the other side of the building from my desk and look down, immediately below you’d have seen the Birmingham Law Courts and, a little further away, Aston University. The university, with its then newly-built red-brick accommodation block, became a key setting in the book. But you could never use THE CITY as a tourist guide to Brum, and that’s one of the reasons why I left the locations unnamed. I took real artistic licence with the geography of the city. Landscapes change continually, and I’ve always been wary of tying a book to a particular location which might cease to exist. In the case of AUTUMN: THE CITY, much of Birmingham has changed. The subways, for example, through which Cooper battles swarms of corpses in the darkness to get to the university, have long since been filled in.

The second AUTUMN novel ends in a very different position to where it began – underground, with all the main characters together for the first time – and it’s no cliché to say that, by the end of the book, I was in a different place too. I’d begun to fully understand the potential scale of the dead world I’d created. I was already planning book three as I was writing THE CITY, and I knew it would be very different to the previous novels. More about PURIFICATION next week.

A look back at AUTUMN: THE CITY is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

Recommended Reading – REEL TERROR

About a year ago, I received an email from Nicole, my editor’s assistant at Thomas Dunne Books, asking me to blurb a new title they’d acquired – REEL TERROR by David Konow. Those of you who’ve had the misfortune of waiting for me to blurb something will know that it usually takes me somewhere between a long time and forever. Not on this occasion: I picked the book up early on a Friday evening and was done by the next day.

REEL TERROR is a lovingly written history of horror cinema, covering everything from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, right up to Paranormal Activity. It’s a fascinating read which looks at why some movies hit the mark and others don’t. Replete with huge numbers of anecdotes and interviews with some of the most important people in the genre, you’ll lap it up if you’re a horror fan like me. Here’s my blurb:

“REEL TERROR is a love letter to a much-maligned genre… thoroughly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in the history of horror movie scares. Written with passion and deep respect, it’ll broaden your understanding of how horror developed from the black-and-white Universal classics to the mainstream smashes of the last decades. A fascinating look at the history of horror, filled with stories, details, and memories that remind you why you fell in love with the genre in the first place. Superb.”

Well worth picking up! REEL TERROR is out today.

Recommended Reading – REEL TERROR is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

Chapter 20 of TRUST

…is now online at www.trustdavidmoody.com.

Chapter 20 of TRUST is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

Think film noir and Douglas Adams having a baby…

…was how one Twitter follower described TRUST this week. Another reader compared the ending of the book to the landmark scene at the end of the original Planet of the Apes. High praise indeed. Judge for yourself – chapter 19 is now online at www.trustdavidmoody.com. Have a good weekend!

Illustration by Craig Paton – www.craigpaton.com.

Think film noir and Douglas Adams having a baby… is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books

An AUTUMN retrospective

This may come across as being a little self-indulgent, but I feel a need to do it anyway.

It’s just a few weeks now until the release of the final AUTUMN novel in the UK. Incredibly, it’s more than ten years since the first book in the series saw the light of day as a free download from the earliest incarnation of this site, and unbelievably it’s also five years since the AUTUMN movie entered production.

This summer saw the release of JOE & ME, and those of you who’ve read it will know how that particular story ties into the whole saga (is it pretentious to call AUTUMN a saga?!). There are a few more short stories to share with you – more about them in the coming weeks – but, on the whole, I feel like the AUTUMN story is finally coming to an end and I’m moving onto new things. That’s unless, of course, anyone wants to commission a WALKING DEAD style AUTUMN TV series…

Spurred on by some very kind words about the books recently (thank you Wayne and Rich!), I thought it would be good to look back over the entire story, so that’s what I’m planning to do. I’m aiming to cover one part/aspect of the series each week leading up to the launch of AFTERMATH, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the stuff I haven’t talked about before – my influences, the locations which inspired certain books and scenes, the development of the characters, how the plot developed etc. etc. So, to kick things off, click the link below to read a few words about AUTUMN. Be warned, there may be spoilers ahead…

There are several scenes in AUTUMN where Michael, Carl and Emma set out from Penn Farm to look for supplies, and find themselves driving down long, winding country lanes which all look the same. It was while driving along miles and miles of roads like that in North Wales one summer many, many years ago, that the first germ of an idea materialised which eventually became AUTUMN. I was daydreaming, imagining a bizarre, nightmare scenario where I set out from one village to drive to another, only to find that by the time I reached my destination, the rest of the world had dropped dead. Lovely, eh?

For whatever reason, I couldn’t let go of the idea, and the story began to unfold. The earliest version of the book began with Michael sitting alone in his car in an isolated car park (which was actually based on this place). He’d just broken up with his long-term partner and had driven out into the middle of nowhere with only a few cans of beer and a takeaway meal for company to try and forget. Waking up next morning, he drives into the nearest town and discovers he’s the only person left alive. Except, he isn’t. At a campsite near the outskirts of the town, Emma Mitchell – a back-packing student – wakes up in her tent next to her dead boyfriend. Panicking, she runs into town to look for help, and there she meets Michael.

The story was originally envisaged as a Twilight Zone-esque, ‘empty planet’ story, but it soon became clear that a key element was missing. There needed to be a threat, and it didn’t take me long to realise the millions of dead bodies lining the suddenly silent streets needed to make a reappearance. And at that point, AUTUMN became a zombie novel.

The beginning and end of the story were very different, but much of the rest of the book bore more of a resemblance to the final version: Michael and Emma find Penn Farm and barricade themselves inside as the dead converge on them, and the situation gradually worsens. In the earliest drafts, however, the couple found a working radio and managed to make contact with a group of survivors holed-up in a city. They decide to stay where they are (figuring that if it’s bad out here at the farm, it’s going to be a thousand times worse in the city). Whilst out fetching supplies, though, they become separated by an enormous horde of bodies, and Michael is killed. Not wanting to stay out in the countryside, isolated and alone, Emma fights her way back into the city to reach the survivors they’d been speaking to.

The first drafts of AUTUMN were written in the mid-1990’s, just after I’d finished STRAIGHT TO YOU. Personal circumstances prevented me from writing anything much for a few years after, and it wasn’t until 2000 that I was finally able to return to the novel. I re-wrote it from scratch, serialising it online and eventually giving the entire book away free – probably one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made.

The 2000/2001 version of the book was pretty much the AUTUMN you know today. I’d had a few years to think about the dynamics of the story and to come up with my own take on zombies (which, coincidentally, had been pretty generic to begin with). I knew I wanted to do away with flesh eating and to create a creature which became progressively more dangerous. Interestingly, the deviation from the zombie mythos which had the biggest impact on the structure of the story, was the decision to make everyone either a plague victim or immune by the end of page one. The importance of that didn’t hit home until much later on. It completely altered the focus of the book by allowing the survivors to concentrate on dealing with their situation without constantly having to avoid getting bitten and becoming one of the walking dead.

I swapped things around, with the original ending of the book (minus Michael’s death) becoming the beginning, and the beginning the end. It made more sense for the survivors to flee from the city rather than towards it, and so the scenes at the Whitchurch Community Centre were born (more about that in a minute). The dynamics of the book still felt uneven, until I took the decision to turn the duo of Michael and Emma into a trio with the addition of Carl. Carl has been an incredibly popular character, and I never cease to be amazed by how many people seem to identify with him. When I first wrote AUTUMN, I was young, free and single. By the time I got around to rewriting it, however, I was married with children. Carl allowed me to explore all the fears and emotions I’d barely even stopped to consider before. How do you motivate yourself to survive, when your every reason for survival has been snatched away?

The major parts of the story were now in place and, to my amazement, people started following the story as I posted it online week by week. Once complete, with the help of a number of folks I made the whole novel downloadable in a range of formats and watched in disbelief as people started downloading it. Numbers steadily increased – from two or three downloads a day to hundreds in a surprisingly short space of time. And then people started asking for more.

I’d always had the idea in the back of my mind for a sequel to AUTUMN, figuring that I’d focus on the bigger group of survivors from the city. In the end I chose a different, even larger group, in a completely different (unnamed) town. Come back next week and I’ll tell you about AUTUMN: THE CITY.

To round off this post, though, I thought I’d leave you with this picture (forgive the quality – it’s a butchered screen grab from Google Maps!). This is a scout headquarters in Birmingham, home to a scout group where my father was a leader for more than fifty years. They used to meet in a ramshackle wooden hut across the road, but my grandfather started an appeal to build a new headquarters and, in 1981, the building you see in the picture below was built. My mom and dad, along with many other volunteers, worked on the building every weekend for month after month, and my brother and I spent endless hours there. Sometimes it felt like I spent more time in that place than I did at home. I grew very attached to it. Twenty years later I was looking for a location in which to base the survivors at the beginning of AUTUMN. With its strong walls, good facilities, its isolated position at the edge of a large park, and a large store room full of camping equipment and supplies, Dad’s scout headquarters seemed the ideal place. So here you have it, the real community centre!

I hope these ramblings have been of interest. As I said at the beginning, I think this is just something I need to get out of my system before I turn my full attention to the new projects I’m working on. If you have any thoughts/memories/comments/grumbles/questions/feedback etc. then please get in touch or leave a comment.

If you’re new to AUTUMN, you’ll find all you need to know at the official website: www.lastoftheliving.net.

An AUTUMN retrospective is a post from: David Moody - author of TRUST and the HATER and AUTUMN books