Haterz

by James Goss

‘I’m not saying the internet made me kill, but it certainly helped.’

Is there someone online who really grates on you? That friend who’s always bragging about their awesome life and endlessly sharing tired memes, and who just doesn’t get jokes? Look at your Twitter feed: don’t you get cross at the endless rage, the thoughtless bigotry and the pleading for celebrity retweets? Meet Dave, a street fundraiser and fan of cat pictures. He’s decided that unfollowing just isn’t enough. He’s determined to make the internet a nicer place, whatever it takes.

When he killed his best friend’s girlfriend, he wasn’t planning on changing the world. She was just really annoying on Facebook. But someone saw, and made him an offer. Someone who knows what he’s capable of, and wants to use him to take control of the darkness at the heart of the internet. And now the bodies – the comment trolls, the sexual predators, the obnoxious pop stars – are starting to mount up...

• ISBN10: 1781083002
• ISBN13: 9781781083000
• Publish Date: 12 March 2015 (first published 24 February 2015)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 5 May 2023
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Solaris
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 384
• Language: English

Reviews

[Leah]

Despite the fact that I regularly say to myself “I’m going to have a week on Netgalley where I don’t request ANYTHING A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G, I invairably lose, because people keep adding such fascinating books! So when I spotted Haterz, I was intrigued. A novel where a guy goes and kills all the annoying people on Facebook and Twitter? YES PLEASE. Sometimes I wonder why I bother with social media because it’s all so pointless and I am well aware of that fact. It’s a way to lose time, procrastinate.

So I was really hoping that Haterz would be my kind of book and that it would be well written (bad writing can kill a book dead within a page, let me tell you) coming from a publisher I haven’t actually heard of. But I requested it, and I was accepted and after wondering what to read next and having a peek at my latest acquisitions, Haterz not only caught my eye, but absorbed me from page one and I didn’t look back, not once. (Except to check David wasn’t setting me up, or following me, or planning to kill me, obviously.)

IT’S A NOVEL ABOUT KILLING ANNOYING PEOPLE ON SOCIAL MEDIA. Not only that, but it’s not as if David woke up one day and thought “Hey, I’m going to kill my best friend’s girlfriend.” It was incidental! It wasn’t even planned! It was amazing. David didn’t debate it, didn’t back out, didn’t spend pages and pages going back and forth; once his mind was made up, that was it, poor Danielle wasn’t going to be in this life much longer. I love books that just get straight to the point. And Haterz did that so very, very well. Once David found a mark (or was pointed in the direction of the mark from the killuminati) he got the job done (mostly).

I also loved that David called the group that was helping him (for lack of a better word) the killuminati. Greatest name ever. I could just imagine a group of ninjas carefully picking targets, looking effortlessly cool. (Even if it wasn’t exactly how it all went down…)

The pace of the novel barely let up; we went from one mark to the next with little concern for the aftereffects. And there was weirdly no guilt from David (which makes me think he was a sociopath).

The kills themselves were amazing. Perhaps a tad too clever for someone who’s a “chugger”, but hey, like David said: Google can teach you anything, so why can’t it teach you to rig a bomb? I was just along for the ride, my worries over the reality firmly in the back seat because watching (or reading) David at work was just so much fun.

My only problem with the novel was the overly-complicated ending. It was all a bit too political and clever for my tastes. Although the last two sentences were genius, if only because they made me smile wryly.

Haterz is a fantastic novel for the times we live in, where social media is king and people can’t go a whole day without Tweeting or Facebooking or whatever. I loved David, I loved how methodical he was in offing all of his targets, and clever about it, too. It wasn’t just a case of showing up and stabbing someone. It was thought out, to avoid being noticed.

I really, really enjoyed the book from start to finish, it was cleverly written and perfectly executed. I want more! More, more, more! There’s something about being able to read about someone doing something you’d love to do – not that I would, but hypothetically, y’know? I swear I am not a sociopath…