Hater

*Starred Review* One day Danny McCoyne’s life tends toward the humdrum: job, family, the usual. The next day, suddenly, without warning or explanation, people are turning into killers, murdering their loved ones, attacking perfect strangers. Soon Danny is trying desperately to keep his family safe, while all around him society seems to be self-destructing, as ordinary men and women turn into animals, filled with hate and violence. This is a truly frightening book because, like Danny, we’re constantly scrambling to process what’s going on. Moody, who self-published the novel in 2006, writes as though his novel were a zombie movie, and readers familiar with the genre will have no difficulty seeing, in their mind’s eye, the rapid dissolution of society played out in front of them. (Is it purely a coincidence that the protagonist has the same first name as Danny Boyle, director of the movie 28 Days Later, whose zombielike creatures were infected with something that filled them with uncontrollable rage?) 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. The movie rights to the book have been sold, and it’ll be interesting to see if the film is as good as the novel. It’s hard to imagine how it could be. --David Pitt