Hater by David Moody

From The Week of February 20, 2011

In order to explore the various aspects of human existence, dramatists often find it necessary to capture relatively minor, societal trends and blow them up to apocalyptic proportions to ensure that their audiences heed their messages of warning. This is what fuels the popularity of genres like zombie fiction, stories built on the fear of our fellow humans devolving into mindless slavishness as a result of repetitive work, poor education, and a willingness to be mastered by their social betters. Mr. Moody is as guilty of this over-amplification as anyone, taking the basic zombie scare, welding some us-versus-them politics on top of it, and then turning the heat up on his re-imagined stew of horror until only an inferno remains. If this is literary art, it is the art of the sledgehammer.

In contemporary England, everyday Britains go about their daily lives, unaware that doom is about to befall them. A new kind of virus is sweeping the country, an affliction which, if contracted, has a good chance of turning the infected into a hateful, violent savage. The condition is characterized by a sudden certainty that everyone around the infected has decided to kill him. The Haters, as they come to be called, respond to this threat by lashing out and brutally murdering the totally innocent bystanders surrounding them. No one, no matter how precious to the victim, is safe from his attacks.

Danny, our narrator, is scraping by at a fairly menial job while supporting a wife and kids. He is the one who communicates to us the slow build of the Hater virus. It is through his eyes that we watch civil society pulled apart while the government looks on, paralyzed. Soon enough, life across Britain has ground to a halt as the Haters threaten to take over and destroy civilization with their nihilism. Will Danny save his family? Will his loved ones contract the illness? Where is it safe to go?

This might have been a thought provoking book if it was not so completely covered in gore; after all, Mr. Moody is playing with some powerful themes: the frailties of identity, both personal and national; the catch 22 of paranoia; and the oppositional nature of our us-versus-them societies. However, the tale mirrors the devolvement of its British society, beginning innocently and intellectually and ending in an orgy of mindless barbarism. In-between, it is a steady march down into Hell. This is not instructive or revelatory; it is gleefully anarchic, as mindless as its Haters. The extent to which Mr. Moody was able to flip the paradigm, exploring paranoia and violence from the inside, is interesting, but the explosions and the noise and the blood make it impossible to hear anything meaningful here. Searing, overwhelming and caustic... (2/5 Stars)