10/09/2017
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. (Dec.)

Praise for One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning:

"A bloody fun ride... Another wetwork nightmare that should delight fans of Haters and intrigue writers who wallow in the genre." —Kirkus Reviews

"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." —Booklist, starred review

"This gloomy psychological horror thriller contains a surprising twist of dystopia, a promising note for the series that it launches." —Library Journal

"Think of a mashup of George Romero and Agatha Christie, and you might have an idea of what awaits you." —The Book Report Network

"Fear stems from isolation and rumor, only to be reinforced by quick and brutal violence. This is gut-wrenchingly realistic survival horror." —Horror Underground blog

"David Moody has a knack for making me feel like a fly on the wall, right there amongst the action but not noticed by the players." —2 Book Lovers Reviews blog, five stars

"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." —DLS Reviews blog

"Moody truly excels at wicked pacing and sharp dialogue, and One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning is no exception." —Ghastly Grinning blog

"One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning is an insightful, rewarding look at physical and social isolation, trust and reaction to adversity when the flight part of "fight or flight" is taken away. It's clever, convincing fiction, claustrophobic fiction." —SFBook Reviews

"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. We await the arrival of book two in the series with considerable interest." —Starburst

Praise for David Moody's previous books:

“[T]his intelligent, well-written chiller heralds a significant new talent.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Hater

“It’s a risky undertaking, giving literary form to a type of story that is traditionally told in pictures, but Moody completely pulls it off.” —Booklist (starred review) on Hater

“Moody has provided us with a brilliant piece of storytelling... read this book now.” —SciFi Now on Hater

"Powerful and well-written." —S.M. Stirling,author of Dies the Fire and The Scourge of God on Hater

“A head-spinning thrill ride, a cautionary tale about the most salient emotion of the 21st century... Hater will haunt you long after you read the last page...”—Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Crimson Peak

“Lean, relentless, and terrifying.” —Kirkus Reviews on Dog Blood

“If Hater gives you nightmares, Dog Blood will rewire your brain.” —Bookreporter.com on Dog Blood

“Gory and relentlessly tense.” —Publishers Weekly on Dog Blood

“Puts most post-apocalyptic novels to shame by facing a reality not commonly dealt with.” —SFSignal on Them or Us

2017-09-18
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.