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Literature / Dog Blood

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Dog Blood is a book by David Moody and the sequel to Hater. The sequel to Dog Blood is called Them or Us.

The Hate has crumbled society to its very foundation and everyone has been forced into a war between those who have been changed into Haters, and those who have not, called the Unchanged.

During the War, we join Danny McCoyne note  as he treks across the Hate-filled Dystopia in search of his daughter, witnessing both friends and enemies fall around him and barely escaping with his own life on numerous occasions. He eventually gets entangled with an undercover terrorist cell with members that include both Haters and Unchanged.


TROPES:

  • Berserk Button: Brutes are Haters who cannot control their Hate no matter what, and will kill the Unchanged despite the cost, and are often chained up outside of Hater bases as watchdogs, often Hulking Out with Unstoppable Rage and speaking Angrish while taking out Unchanged thrice their size.
  • Berserker Tears: Some Haters initially shed tears over mowing down their friends and family. One Unchanged survivor recounts seeing his family murdered by a stranger who had recently become a Hater. This Hater cried during and after the murders, and helped himself to some of his victim's beers fresh out of the fridge in order to calm down.
  • Bloodier and Gorier and Darker and Edgier: Whereas the previous installment featured normal life spiked with brutality, this features a gray, rainy Crapsack World where everyone is either sad or mad, and featuring endless death and destruction.
  • Boomerang Bigot: When one Hater compares Hate-ism to Vampires and Werewolves, another compares themselves to everything from zombies to terrorists. Not that it stops them from performing endless butchery.
  • Child Soldiers: Hater Kids are more powerful than Hater Adults and better fighters. Though the Hater Kids would never fight for the other side, the Unchanged children can be trained to kill other Unchanged. Danny's daughter Ellis is a Brute and is very much a Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb, at one point getting thrown into an armored vehicle to wipe out all the Unchanged soldiers inside.
  • Cower Power: All the Unchanged in their refugee camps.
  • The Ditz: Hater with a grenade.
  • Empowerment: Some Haters feel a false sense of liberation and empowerment after becoming a Hater. One man Danny reminisces about his life before becoming a Hater, and how his employment managers would treat him poorly (unfairly) and how if they treated him today as they did back then, he would kill them without a second thought and with no regrets. One of his former managers is described as a "bitchy redhead", that he would kill if he ever met her again even if she was a Hater, and yet he doesn't even think about back-sassing (let alone killing) the new "bitchy redhead" who serves as his manager in the new Hater terrorist cell, though she treats him poorly, and commands that he give up anything that he considers important other than the cell's objective. She is later killed by another Hater, proving that Danny's lot in life is to be at the bottom of the food chain whether he's a Hater or not.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: One Hater talks of managing not to kill his Unchanged girlfriend.
  • The Everyman: Danny McCoyne, Villain Protagonist, still near the bottom of the pecking order.
  • Fantastic Racism: The Haters' bigotry can be a metaphor for all other kinds of bigotry.
  • False Flag Operation: One of the tactics of the terrorist cell because They Look Just Like Everyone Else!, the Haters pretend to be Unchanged, stir up trouble, and the ensuing chaos will cause the Unchanged military to drop a nuke on hundreds of Unchanged and only a couple of Haters.
  • Freudian Excuse: On the rare occasion that a Hater takes time to ponder why they are killing 7/10ths of the population, they just inventory everything that is wrong with society, as well as personal pet peeves, and project it all onto the strangers that they are killing. For instance, if a man feels oppressed by the fact that he has to work a job to support his family, he could attribute his "oppression" to the Unchanged in order to feel justified. Any defense that the Unchanged use against the Haters is used as an excuse, from gas chambers and nukes, to simply the angry faces that Unchanged people make when getting attacked by Haters.
  • "I'll kill you."
  • Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: All Haters seem to be reverting to their feral, caveman type selves, some more than others. In the first book, the Haters are described as fighting against "bullshit", which seems to be society at large. The Haters fear the Unchanged, and that fear seems to stem from wasting away their lives in an unfulfilling, oppressive "bullshit" society, a fate worse than death. Since all Haters lived in such a society, they retain many of their old ways, though they use that to infiltrate groups of Unchanged, either by using computers, or by going undercover. Some, like the Brutes, have completely reverted to wild animals, and children also fully reverted. Children seem to be more like wild animals in that they need their parents long enough to suckle and learn to walk, and then they become independent, without need of a guardian, unlike some people who depend on their parents well into adulthood, exemplified by Danny's 5-year-old daughter.


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