Posted in October 2010 to my Livejournal, review of both Autumn and Hater by David Moody:

Both of these books (Autumn, and Hater) were previously offered as self-published online downloads. Then Hater got picked up by an actual publisher and did really well, so now Autumn, one of Moody's earliest works, is being published as well. I had to read Autumn for professional review, and I was excited to do so, for I love zombies (fictional zombies, of course -- real zombies are another thing entirely. I hate to admit it, but I would be dead within the first few hours of any zombie apocalypse, because I'm just not all that quick of mind or action). My excitement over reading Autumn lasted about five pages and quickly turned to real pain. On the other hand, Hater had been on my to-read list for a while and had gotten great reviews -- a couple of stars in review journals I trust, even -- but I couldn't reconcile the praise it got with how terribly bad Autumn was. I figured, Moody must have drastically improved as a writer somewhere between those two novels, so I decided to give him a shot and read his more recent book (recent as "in the order written", not "in the order published").

And yes, Hater is a much better book than Autumn, but not so good that I will read the rest of the series. Not so good, in fact, that I didn't skim over certain sections when they began to get repetitive, or skim over the ending, when I was already so far ahead of the plot that I could just skip a couple tedious pages and land where I expected to be. But it is has a lot going for it as a mindless zombie thriller (it has lots of gore; it's very visual; it sets up a thick sense of dread hanging over the main character; and it's fast-paced).

In Autumn, we are stuck with following a small band of extremely dull people as they hole up in a farmhouse and have endless discussion about what they should do next. (Hint: not much.) The zombies, even when they finally become mobile and violent, are not much of a threat and are not really scary. In Hater, we follow one person in particular -- Danny -- as he witnesses his life slowly change from a rational one in which he knows his place to one filled with violence, paranoia, and government cover-ups. Danny is your typical office drudge who dislikes his work, regrets the direction his life is going (nowhere), and loves but is simultaneously resentful of his wife and kids. Because of that, is he much easier to relate to than the cardboard people we get in Autumn, and while he never became someone I liked, he did earn my sympathy and my interest. His voice was also distinctive -- Hater is narrated in first person, present tense, which gives it a very effective immediacy. Reading it is effortless and fast.

Moody does a lot of the same things in Autumn and Hater, but he does them better in Hater. Mostly. In both books, he shows the effects of the virus on different people, one in each chapter. In Autumn, we get several short chapters in a row in which a new character is shocked and horrified when everybody drops dead around him or her. By the fourth time, you're like, yeah, I get what's going on, I get the point, can we move on now? He set the same scene over and over and over without really telling us anything. It's a technique that would work well in a movie, when you can do it in a shocking ten-minute montage or something, but not in a book. It didn't help that, aside from location, each of these scenes is a mirror of the rest, and none of the "characters" turned out to be anybody. In Hater, Moody does the same thing, only by this time he's learned to space out these "discovery" chapters, each one appearing at the beginning of a new section of the novel. They still get repetitive (yeah, character goes crazy and violently kills someone nearby, I get it) but at least they don't happen all at once. For some readers, it could lead to an increasing sense of tension, as we wait for this to happen to our main character, Danny. You know the violence has to directly affect him at some point, so it definitely sets the mood. For me, though, I started skipping over them about halfway through the book, because even though the gore was excellent, they distracted from Danny's story, which was the only story I was interested in. I think Moody should have quit them by the middle of the book, when they were no longer revealing anything new about how the virus works.

Hater would make a good movie. So might Autumn. (Good thing, right, since they've both been optioned.) The premise of both books isn't terribly original but they fit well within the "virus" zombie genre and I think as movies they might actually be scary. Hater also has a suffocating sense of paranoia, of not really knowing what's going on but knowing there's something larger out there at work, that Moody pulls off pretty successfully. Things go to hell slowly, with just the right amount of paranoia taking hold and just the right amount of worry that the paranoia is more of a problem than the reality of the violent attacks. I was able to look past the mediocre clunky writing in Hater because of being so immersed in Danny's head and because of the relentless pacing. (The only thing relentless in Autumn is the boredom.)

So, though I probably won't read any more of Moody's books, I will go see the movies, and I will probably enjoy them.