The Living Dead
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3.7 • 35 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A horror landmark and a work of gory genius.”—Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman
New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus completes George A. Romero's brand-new masterpiece of zombie horror, the massive novel left unfinished at Romero's death!
George A. Romero invented the modern zombie with Night of the Living Dead, creating a monster that has become a key part of pop culture. Romero often felt hemmed in by the constraints of film-making. To tell the story of the rise of the zombies and the fall of humanity the way it should be told, Romero turned to fiction. Unfortunately, when he died, the story was incomplete.
Enter Daniel Kraus, co-author, with Guillermo del Toro, of the New York Times bestseller The Shape of Water (based on the Academy Award-winning movie) and Trollhunters (which became an Emmy Award-winning series), and author of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch (an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year). A lifelong Romero fan, Kraus was honored to be asked, by Romero's widow, to complete The Living Dead.
Set in the present day, The Living Dead is an entirely new tale, the story of the zombie plague as George A. Romero wanted to tell it.
It begins with one body.
A pair of medical examiners find themselves battling a dead man who won’t stay dead.
It spreads quickly.
In a Midwestern trailer park, a Black teenage girl and a Muslim immigrant battle newly-risen friends and family. On a US aircraft carrier, living sailors hide from dead ones while a fanatic makes a new religion out of death. At a cable news station, a surviving anchor keeps broadcasting while his undead colleagues try to devour him. In DC, an autistic federal employee charts the outbreak, preserving data for a future that may never come.
Everywhere, people are targeted by both the living and the dead.
We think we know how this story ends.
We. Are. Wrong.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filmmaker Romero (1940 2017), best known for Night of the Living Dead, offers a sweeping look at the rise, fall, and rebirth of humanity in the face of a zombie menace in this long-winded horror novel, posthumously completed by Kraus (Bent Heavens). Patient zero appears in "the early months of the 21st century," when a John Doe is registered to the U.S. Census Bureau twice: once upon his death and again after the medical examiner shoots his reawakened body. From there the virus spreads, reaching a large but underdeveloped cast, among them a teenager living in a trailer park, a news anchor who sequesters himself in his studio to continuously broadcast news of the zombie panic even after he's no longer sure if anyone's watching, and a chaplain aboard the USS Olympia who slowly goes mad. Throughout, the zombie threat is granted its own, second-person perspective: "You are hungry. You wake up. In that order." In this innovation alone Romero paints a fresher picture of the zombie apocalypse, following the zombie's perspective 15 years into the future to examine the lifespan and evolution of the creatures. Otherwise, this doorstopper reads like an extended cut of Romero's horror films. This belabored amalgamation of zombie tropes is epic but familiar.
Customer Reviews
The Real Monsters
This story doesn’t just thrill you with a zombiepocalypse from beginning to end, but tries to determine a meaning to the dead doing the biologically impossible- what was death itself thinking when it sent back the dead to feast on the living?
In keeping with the central premise of all great zombie stories that living humans are the real monsters, the story leaves the initial outbreak to describe the eventual restart of human settlements when zombies decompose too much to be a threat. But how to start over? One group tries a community based on compassion and sharing, with disastrous results. Our survivors don’t all survive their fellow humans, and the ones that do must flee as if zombies were chasing them again.
A satisfying zombie tale, well worth the long read.
Purchase World War Z instead
Identity politics ruined what could have been a excellent ending to the Romero Zombie series. Instead this book attempts to copy World War Z with identity politics and fails miserably. Save your money & purchase World War Z instead the audio book is also available for free on YouTube.
Really wanted to like this
I was really expecting better but it feels more like a book that’s about political opinions instead of zombies.