Before Master of Horror George A. Romero passed away last year he was working on a new novel about, you guessed it, zombies. Titled The Living Dead, the novel was meant to transition Romero’s zombie tales from the big screen to print. Unfortunately, he was not able to finish The Living Dead before he passed, but like his beloved zombies, the book will rise from the dead.
EW is reporting that The Shape of Water writer Daniel Kraus has signed on to complete the novel which will be released in the Fall of 2019, via Tor.
What’s exciting about the novel…It’s huge. It’s a massively scaled story, a real epic, the kind no one ever gave him the budget to film,” Kraus told EW. “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.” He continued. “TThe state [of the manuscript] varied,” Kraus says of the unfinished novel Romero left behind. “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.”
In The Living Dead…
“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.”