Review: Dog Blood

Read 9/24/10 - 9/29/10

4 Stars - Strongly Recommended

Pgs:322 (Book two of the Hater trilogy)

It's war baby, and the Unchanged don't stand a chance.

In Dog Blood, the sequel to David Moody's novel Hater, No one cares about what caused the Hate anymore. Self-preservation is the priority. The world is beginning to fall apart, buildings rotting away or damaged in battle. Food and clean water is becoming harder and harder to come by. Unchanged men, women, and children slowly begin to move into the cities, cramming themselves into office buildings, and apartments, waiting for their food rations to be doled out. Soldiers take teams of volunteers out beyond the exclusion (or safe) zones to seek out people who have been surviving on their own, to bring them back to the home base. They feel safer and stronger in groups.

Haters join together and attack these rescue missions, picking off the Unchanged one by one. The war between "us" and "them" is inescapable. And it won't stop until one or the other are wiped off the face of the planet.

One Hater, our Hater, Danny, bounces from place to place, preferring to remain alone. He finds comfort in the shadows and the outskirts, believing that his ability to remain hidden, his hunger for killing, and his desire to find his 5 year old daughter Ellis is what has kept him alive this long. Yet, ironically enough, it's during his search for Ellis that Danny finds himself captured by a group of Unchanged people... who are determined to teach Danny how to hold the Hate.

Can Haters be taught to control the urge to kill? Will they ever be able to walk among the Unchanged and blend in with society again?

David Moody creates a bleak and devastating world in which man has turned against man, where trust and companionship no longer live, a world of constant turmoil and chaos. He takes us deeper inside Danny's head and introduces us to the filthy, brutal life of a Hater. Though Danny appears to be selfish and self serving, we discover that looking out for number one is the only way to ensure ones existence. It's the new way of life, and one that most people quickly adapted to.

Brilliantly narrated, violent and ferocious, unlike anything I have read before it - With his Hater Trilogy, Moody ushers in the newest fiction monster craze! Say goodbye to Zombie and Vampire Lit, shelf the wanna-be-breakout novels about Angels and Unicorns. Moody's Haters are taking the world by force, and leaving a sea of bloody corpses in their wake. And their sights are set on you!

A gigantic thank you goes out to author David Moody, who made these review copies available to me!