Oscar winning director Guillermo del Toro (THE SHAPE OF WATER, PAN’S LABYRINTH) called Moody’s 2009 novel HATER “a head-spinning thrill ride, a cautionary tale about the most salient emotion of the 21st century”. After tearing the human race in half in HATER and its two critically acclaimed sequels DOG BLOOD and THEM OR US, Moody’s now paying a return visit to his dystopian world with a brand new trilogy.
ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING (now available from St Martin’s Press) and the forthcoming follow-ups ALL ROADS END HERE (published September 25 2018) and CHOKEHOLD (2019) tell the other (equally brutal and blood-soaked) side of the original HATER story, with the six books ultimately combining to form a single epic dystopian saga.
With the long-gestating HATER movie in active development, Moody went right back to the beginning. “HATER is an insular and very personal vision of the apocalypse,” he said. “It’s literally one man’s journey through the end of days. That works really well on the page, but we’ve recently been talking about a TV adaptation and I found myself fleshing out plotlines to show how my anti-hero Danny’s story fitted in with the decline of the rest of the world at large. I was able to go back and look at the events Danny was a part of in a new light. It sounds like a blatant cash-in but it’s really not – the new books have enhanced the original trilogy in a way I could never have imagined.”
Critical reaction to the first book in the new series – the snappily-titled ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING – has exceeded Moody’s expectations. Kirkus called the book “A bloody fun ride… Another wetwork nightmare that should delight fans of Haters and intrigue writers who wallow in the genre”, while Booklist’s starred review said that “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”. DLS Reviews said that “the novel rips you out of your safe and sung world and thrusts you into an environment where anyone can turn on you in the blink of an eye. It’s hard-hitting, head-poundingly tense, and drenched from head to toe in blood-splattered cruelty.”
ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING is available now in hardcover and ebook from St Martin’s Press, and as an audiobook from Macmillan Audio. Find out more about Moody at www.davidmoody.net.
