One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning

October 1, 2017
Fifteen people trapped on a remote island in the North Sea struggle to survive during a violent outbreak.This nasty new piece by prolific horror writer Moody (Strangers, 2014, etc.) is a side-quel to his popular survival trilogy that began with Haters (2006). He's taken a different tack here, one that feels much more like a cinematic work than a literary one. Where Haters followed a single character, here Moody pulls back to a third-person omniscient POV to follow a Battle Royale-style contest of wits and guts among 15 people. The book is set on Skek, a deserted island once home to a military outpost and a science expedition, now the base for an extreme sports team-building enterprise. When a violent epidemic takes hold, things go sideways in a hurry. A young woman is shoved off a cliff after attacking another team member. A passenger ferry is found smashed up on shore, with only a bloody aftermath to reveal the fate of its passengers. Even amid all this terror, our heroes are delightfully self-aware. "It's a bit bloody shortsighted if you ask me," says one. "You're running an extreme-sports center in the middle of the bloody ocean, and you don't have a viable escape route?" In another exchange, a character named Paul calls out the most obvious analogy to his mate Matt. "It's just that this sounds like the start of a shitty zombie movie, that's all. It sounds fucking stupid, if I'm honest." As with its spiritual predecessors, soon the remaining dozen or so survivors are divided between "Haters" and the "Unchanged," hurtling toward the inevitable cliffhanger. It's not high art by any stretch and lacks the sociological inquiry of Max Brooks' World War Z, but for a bloody fun ride, it gets the job done.Another wetwork nightmare that should delight fans of Haters and intrigue writers who wallow in the genre.

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October 9, 2017
Moody launches a saga in the world of his Haters series (Dog Blood) with this grim tale of endless disaster. A group of coworkers are more than ready to conclude team building exercises on the remote island of Skek, off the coast of England, and head home. Then they find a boat crashed on the rocks that’s full of dead and injured school children and their minders. It’s soon clear that someone is loose on the island, bent on murder. When the island’s owner arrives from the mainland, he reports that people dubbed Haters are erupting in mindless violence without warning. Cut off from help, short on resources, and high on paranoia, the two dwindling groups, who can’t even trust each other, must find a way off the island despite the promise of death waiting for them everywhere else. Moody covers the familiar ground of zombie thrillers, but these aren’t zombies: they’re living people who have an insatiable need to kill, uninhibited yet fully capable of forming thought. The tense narrative is relentless and gory, with more than a touch of nihilism. Readers who seek a glimmer of hope in their apocalypse may want to look elsewhere. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Literary.

Starred review from October 15, 2017
After a five-year gap, British horror maestro Moody returns to his popular Hater series. The fourth installment (which takes place roughly concurrently with the first, 2006's Hater) is mostly set on a small island where a group of colleagues are having one of those corporate team-building getaways. It's going OK until one of the group dies in a fall from a cliff. Then the boat scheduled to return them to the mainland is late; bodies of children start washing up on the shore; and, when the boat finally turns up, it's wrecked and littered with bodies. Then violence breaks out on the island, and the group plunges into anarchy and paranoia, fueled in part by radio news stories describing how people all around the world are changing into ultraviolent creatures that are already being called Haters: Who on the island is about to change? Who has already changed? The book ends on a cold, brutal note, asin a logical progression of the story begun in Haterthe line between the Haters and the uninfected has become so thin that it's virtually nonexistent. Moody really knows how to write creeping, claustrophobic terror, effectively sneaking up on his readers and, finally, scaring the life out of them. Top-drawer horror.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)