Woah ho ho! Drunken Goon must be moving up in the world. Either that or someone didn’t really read my blog too closely and maybe decided I was a “real” reviewer.
See, I got sent an Advance Readers’ Edition of Dog Blood by David Moody in the hopes that I’d review it. For some reason, though, this made me instantly not want to read the book. Not because I didn’t think it was going to be good, but because it now became “something I needed to do”. I think that’s just something weird in my brain though. As soon as I schedule anything I almost instantly don’t want to do it. Hell, it could be a trip to the naked lady brewery but as soon as I put it on my calendar, I start to dread it.
But, I found myself traveling a lot in May and June so I had lots of time for reading. I sucked it up and dove into Dog Blood. Turns out it is a sequel to a book called Hater. It was easy enough to pick up the story in the middle, though. I realized a few things as soon as I started reading this book:
- Despite the fact that I’ve read buckets of sci-fi in my day (Probably at least 90% of all Hugo award winners for starts) I don’t think I’ve ever read a zombie book before
- This book is not your run-of-the-mill zombie book
Realization #2 didn’t happen right away, though. It seems like the first chapter is set up in a way to make you think this is going to read like a screen play for your standard zombie movie. Then the book shifts a little bit and you realize that the chapters alternate between the normal human’s perspective and the “zombies” perspective.
Yup, that’s right, the zombies are smart. In fact, it isn’t really fair to call them zombies. The book calls them haters and the premise is that “something” happened to randomly change normal people into haters. Haters are pretty much like you and me, except they can’t resist the urge to kill non-haters. They can also sense the difference between haters and non-haters (something that normal human’s can’t do). I guess, imagine smart rage zombies and you are halfway there.
I really want to read the first book, Hater, to get more background on the actual change process and what happened during those first few weeks/months. Many of the haters suddenly found themselves attacking/killing their own families. Children killing parents, etc.
Anyway, back to Dog Blood. It was a lot of fun to read and it definitely kept my interest. I think I stayed up late two nights and polished her off. My one bitch is that I didn’t really dig the ending. It seems like Moody is setting the stage for a series of these books and I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. It was sort of like Back to the Future 2 when it ends and you know that there has to be a sequel. This had the same feel. Almost like the pilot episode of the TV series. Regardless, I’m still going to go back and read Hater and I’ll probably read whatever the next installment is. We’ll have to see how far I take it after that.
P.S. I was just peaking at the back cover of Dog Blood and there is some high praise from Guillermo Del Toro for Hater. So, maybe we can expect a movie soon?