![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hater by David Moody: I'm not a fan
Nov. 10th, 2011 11:20 amThere's really nothing so frustrating for a writer as to come up with a great idea, than to find out it's already been done. It can be as simple as a line of dialogue—you thought you'd come up with a cool line, but try publishing it and you're Cassandra Claire. And even if you go ahead with your idea despite its similarity, you invite comparison to an entirely different work, like when Devin Grayson's Rape of Nightwing story (c'mon, that's all anyone's going to remember it as) had to suffer, and I do mean suffer, comparison to Frank Miller's classic Daredevil story Born Again.
But there's some opportunity there as well. If you know where one author zigged, you can always zag, and it's always reassuring to know that when some hack has a similar idea to yours, they write it completely differently. Badly, in fact.
Oh, is this a review for Hater by David Moody? What a coincidence.
I first knew about Hater only from the premise—ordinary people start going homicidally insane. It's an intriguing idea; you can see why horror maestro Guillermo del Toro optioned it as one of the five million movies he intends to make once human cloning is perfected. Cut to years later, wherein I have a story idea that requires an apocalyptic scenario. I want to do something new—not another zombie apocalypse—and had the idea of ordinary people "Twisting," or Rob Bottining into killer monsters. On the surface, they're similar ideas, so I figured I might as well find out where Moody zigged.
The answer being, off a cliff.
To start off, the title. It's inaccurate. We're given numerous scenes set from the perspective of the "Hater" and they're driven to kill by feelings of revulsion and fear, not a sudden overwhelming hate. For another thing, Hater is a ubiquitous slang term. It's like writing a novel about zombie children called "The Cool Kids." Because they're kids and they're dead, thus cool. But you'd have a hard time taking something seriously if the fearsome monsters were referred to as that, right? This book was published in 2006. The most popular definition of Hater was added to Urban Dictionary in February 2005. This tells me that no one in the publishing industry knows how to use Google.
Although, I will be having a group in my novel refer to the monsters as "Haters," if only so the hero can say "Why, do they not like Katy Perry?" Who burnt?
Just to be incredibly egocentric, I'll list ways in which Hater differs from my own project, and why these "zigs" are so poorly-executed that I'm tempted to list them as bad choices altogether.
First off, most zombie stories (which this essentially is) start in media res, with the zombie apocalypse already in progress. The government has broken down, the shit has hit the fan, the fat lady has sung. Two entirely separate stories, 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, used the conceit of the hero being in a coma to skip over all the boring stuff. There's a simple explanation for this: the zombie genre is really about normal people and how they respond when pushed to the limit, and no one gets pushed to the limit after one week without the internet. It makes them look wussy.
Another reason is that the big responses to cataclysm are usually the same, across genre. Either people are trying to get out of dodge or holing up. There are riots. Faceless stormtroopers threaten. Looting abounds. The government seems to be withholding information. It's very hard to get much mileage out of these clichés, because they've been seen so many times. The way they're depicted in Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead are downright iconic. How are you going to top Romero at the height of his game?
What Hater does is it starts with the first Hating, then goes from day to day to day. It doesn't skip ahead at all. Which means we get a lot of scenes of day-to-day life as our heroes sloooooowly figure out something is wrong and barricade themselves in their apartment to slooooooowly wait for help.
Now you're going to scream at me like I'm a Michael Bay fan and tell me I can't appreciate rising tension or mystery or dread. The thing is, that's the entire point of a horror novel, the slow burn. A movie can tread water with shock value and jump scares, but you can't really do that in prose because oh my god a psycho just jumped out of nowhere and chopped my head off!
See? Not scary. And sure, you can make an end-run around this with loving descriptions of gore and rape—your 'splatterpunk' books—but that's not really scary, that's just helping a blind person browse Rotten.com. "And here's a guy who blew his head off… yup, his brain is all over the place… yeah, it's really gross."
Only Moody didn't get the memo. He starts every chapter with a Hating. This quickly becomes repetitive, as every scene is exactly the same. "John and Jim are doing something. Suddenly, Jim goes crazy and kills John. What's up with that?" It completely ruins any possible mystique for the Haters in favor of cheap splatter, and very few of the scenarios even draw a visceral reaction. (The Hating that happens during a vasectomy ends exactly as you'd expect it to.) And needless to say, we don't care about any of these characters, since they show up for at most a page before getting killed.
( And wait till you get to the hero. )
But there's some opportunity there as well. If you know where one author zigged, you can always zag, and it's always reassuring to know that when some hack has a similar idea to yours, they write it completely differently. Badly, in fact.
Oh, is this a review for Hater by David Moody? What a coincidence.
I first knew about Hater only from the premise—ordinary people start going homicidally insane. It's an intriguing idea; you can see why horror maestro Guillermo del Toro optioned it as one of the five million movies he intends to make once human cloning is perfected. Cut to years later, wherein I have a story idea that requires an apocalyptic scenario. I want to do something new—not another zombie apocalypse—and had the idea of ordinary people "Twisting," or Rob Bottining into killer monsters. On the surface, they're similar ideas, so I figured I might as well find out where Moody zigged.
The answer being, off a cliff.
To start off, the title. It's inaccurate. We're given numerous scenes set from the perspective of the "Hater" and they're driven to kill by feelings of revulsion and fear, not a sudden overwhelming hate. For another thing, Hater is a ubiquitous slang term. It's like writing a novel about zombie children called "The Cool Kids." Because they're kids and they're dead, thus cool. But you'd have a hard time taking something seriously if the fearsome monsters were referred to as that, right? This book was published in 2006. The most popular definition of Hater was added to Urban Dictionary in February 2005. This tells me that no one in the publishing industry knows how to use Google.
Although, I will be having a group in my novel refer to the monsters as "Haters," if only so the hero can say "Why, do they not like Katy Perry?" Who burnt?
Just to be incredibly egocentric, I'll list ways in which Hater differs from my own project, and why these "zigs" are so poorly-executed that I'm tempted to list them as bad choices altogether.
First off, most zombie stories (which this essentially is) start in media res, with the zombie apocalypse already in progress. The government has broken down, the shit has hit the fan, the fat lady has sung. Two entirely separate stories, 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, used the conceit of the hero being in a coma to skip over all the boring stuff. There's a simple explanation for this: the zombie genre is really about normal people and how they respond when pushed to the limit, and no one gets pushed to the limit after one week without the internet. It makes them look wussy.
Another reason is that the big responses to cataclysm are usually the same, across genre. Either people are trying to get out of dodge or holing up. There are riots. Faceless stormtroopers threaten. Looting abounds. The government seems to be withholding information. It's very hard to get much mileage out of these clichés, because they've been seen so many times. The way they're depicted in Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead are downright iconic. How are you going to top Romero at the height of his game?
What Hater does is it starts with the first Hating, then goes from day to day to day. It doesn't skip ahead at all. Which means we get a lot of scenes of day-to-day life as our heroes sloooooowly figure out something is wrong and barricade themselves in their apartment to slooooooowly wait for help.
Now you're going to scream at me like I'm a Michael Bay fan and tell me I can't appreciate rising tension or mystery or dread. The thing is, that's the entire point of a horror novel, the slow burn. A movie can tread water with shock value and jump scares, but you can't really do that in prose because oh my god a psycho just jumped out of nowhere and chopped my head off!
See? Not scary. And sure, you can make an end-run around this with loving descriptions of gore and rape—your 'splatterpunk' books—but that's not really scary, that's just helping a blind person browse Rotten.com. "And here's a guy who blew his head off… yup, his brain is all over the place… yeah, it's really gross."
Only Moody didn't get the memo. He starts every chapter with a Hating. This quickly becomes repetitive, as every scene is exactly the same. "John and Jim are doing something. Suddenly, Jim goes crazy and kills John. What's up with that?" It completely ruins any possible mystique for the Haters in favor of cheap splatter, and very few of the scenarios even draw a visceral reaction. (The Hating that happens during a vasectomy ends exactly as you'd expect it to.) And needless to say, we don't care about any of these characters, since they show up for at most a page before getting killed.
( And wait till you get to the hero. )
