I was slightly disappointed in this book considering how much I enjoyed Hater. Still a fun Halloween month read.

started out a little slow but picked up break neck (pardon the pun) speed towards the last third or so. really amazed at the author's ability to make you care about characters that are killers slaughtering innocent people. on to the trilogy's conclusion!

The Beginning: The cause of the Hate (as it had come to be known on both sides of the uneven divide) was irrelevant.

I knew it would be difficult for Dog Blood to match Hater. The second instalment is always difficult. We don't get the excitement of the first novel, the what-the-hell-is-going-on-rush, which was really powerful in Hater, where we really didn't know what the hell was going on. That was amazing. Second instalments can be both brilliant and horrible. Good authors use the second book to explain things, to focus on the characters or to just tell us more awesome stories. Bad authors (very bad!) just use it for filling. Or to earn extra money (bad, bad authors!).

Dog Blood falls into neither category. I didn't feel the same zsa-zsa-zsu as I did in the first one. But it was still freaking thrilling. It's one of those books that swallow you whole - whenever I opened it, I was completely dead to the world. Speaking of dead, this is the first time the word "zombie" found its way into the story:

'We drag ourselves around constantly, looking for unchanged to kill. It's almost like we're feeding off them. When you're killing, you feel alive, like you can do anything, but the rest of the time it's like you're in limbo. Just existing. Not really living, but not dead either …'

'So what are you saying?'

'I'm saying we're like zombies,' I finally admit.

I'm usually not that crazy about the last instalments - you know, the final battle. I don't really care that much about battles, I care more about the descriptions and character developments. But I'm very curious about Them or Us, the last one in this series. Many of the things I expected to be settled in the last book, were already put to a horrifying end in Dog Blood. I'm so excited about the next one, but have to wait a while before I buy it, as there's simply no space left in my to-read-shelf.

PS: Amazing shot of my cat, right? She's usually so sweet ...

This is the 2nd book in Moody's Hater trilogy. I really enjoyed this one as well, it didn't lose my interest and was just as good as the first, in my opinion. No vampires or zombies, just human monsters; but monsters nevertheless. These books are about a Hate that has taken over some people and this book focuses on the fighting between the Haters and the Unchanged. Very violent, with blood and gore, along with a human side. Really enjoyed the first and the second, now onto the third.

David Moody, Dog Blood (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010)

Unlike (I assume) most prospective readers of Moody's latest, Dog Blood, I have not read its prequel, Hater. (And judging by Dog Blood's end, I'm going to posit that this is the middle book in a pending trilogy.) I am familiar with moody through the Autumn quartet, which I read four or five years ago and which have become something of a self-publishing success story, not only launching what has since become one of the most popular small horror presses in existence but also gaining Moody a contract with a major house. Which brings us to Dog Blood, the first book Moody has produced for Thomas Dunne (which previously re-released Hater).

Dog Blood focuses on Danny McCoyne, one of the Haters, humans infected with a virus that drives them to kill anyone uninfected (the Haters call them the Unchanged). There are varying levels of Hate infection; Danny, for example, is still reasonable and intelligent, while others are what the Hater community calls Brutes, who have lost all reason and exist only to kill. (Hate infection is paralleled with addiction a number of times in the book, and Moody does an interesting job of drawing the distinction between maintenance addicts and junkies, if only anyone would listen.) The driving force in Danny's life is to find his daughter Ellis, also a Hater, and who has been missing since the initial outbreak of Hate four months previous. Meanwhile, a large number of the Unchanged have barricaded themselves inside the confines of a small city, and we get various updates on the state of life among the humans as we go on. You know these two storylines are going to collide eventually, and while it's kind of predictable, I love the connection Moody makes between them. Also, as in the Autumn novels, the guy really, really knows how to write a satisfying-yet-ambiguous-and-really-downbeat ending.

A lot of the same problems I had with the Autumn quartet I had with Dog Blood. The writing is decent, if nothing spectacular; when you look at Moody's self-published work, it stands head and shoulders above much of the vanity/self-published stuff simply because Moody can actually write. Put him up against the bigs, however, and the shortcomings become clear pretty quick. Moody's writing is readable enough and well-paced, but it's often emotionless and always far more concerned with advancing the plot than with characterization. I rush to add this is not always a bad thing in genre fiction, and it's a lot less crucial here (where plot is king) than it was in the Autumn novels (which are much slower and focus more on character). Readable it is; I blew through it in an afternoon after finishing another short book. I wonder if I'd have gotten more out of it had I previously read Hater, but can't really answer that question for obvious reasons. To be on the safe side, I'll tell you that if this one interests you, go ahead and grab Hater first. ***

Something's happened, and about 2/3 of the population are zombie-like berzerkers who like nothing better than to eviscerate or otherwise pulverize the "healthy" 1/3 of the population.

You're either a human, or a hater.

Danny McCoyne is a hater who has very real memories of his wife and daughter, and some crumb of humanity that messes with the killing program.

Interesting premise and not a bad read.

No mistake, Dog Blood is not for everyone, and there are many who will see little value in its intense cynicism and graphic violence. But connoisseurs of the genre will realize the craft behind the mayhem, and will appreciate Moody's refusal to enliven his grim fairy tale with humour or hope. This is the horror of blood and guts, the horror of vintage Romero and Fulci, and if you're not prepared for it, why are you reading it?

Read the rest of the review here.

At the end of 'Hater' the world was dividing between the regular humans (the unchanged) and the haters. In 'Dog blood' the haters have started to organize in order to wipe out the unchanged. Danny joins a rag-tag militant group, at the same time as he is trying to find his daughter, who is also a hater and still in her unchanged mother's care.

My biggest problem with this book, was that I had so few characters that I had any hope of relating to. The haters don't care about anything other than killing the unchanged and surviving. They don't even care about each other much. They don't have friends or lovers, and once you're unable to fight you are pretty much worthless. The author has given Danny more emotional depth than the average hater comes equipped with, but he is still more rabid animal than human. when you weigh those two things against each other, it isn't really possible to sympathize with Danny or to become very interested in him as a character, yet most of the story is told from his perspective.

I wasn't really sure whether to give the book two or three stars. The writing was good, I thought. Better than in Hater. The author does a great job of creating side-characters that are so aggravating they make your skin crawl. But I landed on two stars in the end, because of the problems I mentioned before.

Action packed, but starting to lose the plot