With help from writer Daniel Kraus, zombie magnum opus is ready to finally see the harsh light of day.
When the legendary horror creator died in 2017, George Romero was working on a novel — The Living Dead, a massive, multi-perspective epic detailing a society overrun by zombies. The book, taking a global perspective, was even set to feature narration from a zombie itself as one of its many perspectives. He didn’t finish that book.
Now, after years, Daniel Kraus, a zombie aficionado and fan of Romero’s who worked with the blessing of the Romero estate, has finished the book and is set to unleash it. Kraus, before this, worked directly with Guillermo del Toro on the book Trollhunters and is no stranger to best-selling horror.
In a world full of George Romero fanatics, you’d be hard-pressed to find one more fanatic than me,” Kraus told Syfy Wire. “I literally grew up on his movies and he was almost like a father figure to me. The first movie I’d ever seen was Night of the Living Dead, and I’ve seen it since the age of five or six countless times.”
Kraus’s fandom ended up being a very valuable resource when he was contacted, then, by the late creator’s manager after his death, inquiring after Kraus’s interest on working on finishing his incomplete novel.
“The idea was to take what [Romero had] done in smaller doses — which was views of America throughout the decades — and construct one larger picture of the fall of America through the catalyst of the zombie plague. And that fall could represent a lot of things,” Kraus said of the book, which tells its story over a long period of time, roughly fifteen years from outbreak to aftermath.
Kraus has a lot to say about the book, including specific thematic and narrative content that might be a little spoiler-y if you want to go in blind, but that you should read at some point or another, over at Syfy Wire. The book is slated for an August 4th release via Tor Books, and might just be the most intriguing zombie novel to come out in quite a while.