George A. Romero’s Unfinished Living Dead Novel Will Be Completed by Daniel Kraus
Mike Sprague
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Before the tragic passing of writer-director George A. Romero it turns out the filmmaker was working on an all-new Living Dead novel. And today we have word via EW that the novel will be finished by another writer.
Yes, author Daniel Kraus, who co-wrote the novel version of The Shape of Water with Guillermo Del Toro, will be finishing up Romero’s novel fittingly called “The Living Dead”.
“The state [of the manuscript] varied,” Kraus says. “Some of it was in tremendous, publish-ready state. Other parts, near of the end of what he wrote, were sketchier, clearly intended to be fleshed out later.”
He continues: “Only half the job I’m doing is finishing this book. The other half is putting George back together, in a sense — not just from reading his every obscure interview and analyzing his every obscure work, but also immersing myself in the art that he loved. I’m studying his favorite movies, watching his favorite operas, listening to his favorite music, all in an attempt to find in them the inspirations he might have found. I’m taking thematic and structural cues from these works and working them into the book. It’s not like having George next to me, but it’s what I have, and I’m treasuring every moment of it.”
In what is probably the most interesting aspect of the upcoming novel, Kaus talked a bit about the scope of the novel, which he says is going to be huge.
“It’s a massively scaled story,” Kaus says. “A real epic, the kind no one ever gave him the budget for in a film. In a book, of course, there is no budget, and in his pages you can feel his joy of being able, at last, to do every single thing he wanted.”
Nice. Even though Romero couldn’t finish the book himself, I’m glad that someone is stepping up to the plate to deliver a respectful continuation. The novel, by the way, will be edited by Brendan Deneen
Are you excited about this new Living Dead novel by George A. Romero? Of course, you are. Let us know how excited below.
“The Living Dead” will be released by Tor in Fall 2019.
Synopsis:
On October 24th, John Doe rises from the dead. Assistant Medical Examiner Luis Acocella and his assistant Charlene Rutkowksi are vivisecting him when it happens, and so begins a global nightmare beyond comprehension.
Greer Morgan is a teenager living in a trailer park, and when the dead begin their assault, the true natures of her neighbors are revealed. Chuck Chaplin is a pretty-boy cable-news anchor, and the plague brings sudden purpose to his empty life.
Karl Nishimura is the helmsman of the U.S.S. Vindicator, a nuclear submarine, and he battles against a complete zombie takeover of his city upon the sea. And meanwhile, a mysterious woman named Etta Hoffmann records the progress of the epidemic from a bunker in D.C., as well as the broken dreams and stubborn hopes of a nation not ready to give up.
Spread across three separate time periods and combining Romero’s biting social commentary with Kraus’s gift for the beautiful and grotesque, the book rockets forward as the zombie plague explodes, endures, and finally, in a shocking final act, begins to radically change.
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