Death is not the end. George Romero, famed father of the zombie flick never quite got to lay out his full vision of the zombie apocalypse in film. Instead, he turned to writing and spent decades drafting and making notes for a grand zombie epic that wouldn’t be held back by budgets, producers, and the whims of Hollywood. Unfortunately, this magnum opus was left unfinished at the time of Romero’s death in 2017. That’s where Daniel Kraus came in. A life-long Romero fan and celebrated author (he recently co-wrote the novelization of The Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro), Kraus sifted through all of Romero’s writings and notes, did an impressive amount of research, and worked to put together a finished novel that stayed true to Romero’s spirit. The result is The Living Dead by George Romero and Daniel Kraus, which came out from Tor on August 4.
The Living Dead is a massive book, split into three acts of unequal length. The majority of the book is taken up with Act One, which covers the first two weeks of the zombie apocalypse. Jumping around to different points of view, we see Etta Hoffman, the antisocial statistician who documents cases of the dead coming back to life; medical examiner Luis Acocella and his assistant Charlie, who witness the very first revival; Greer, an underprivileged teenager who must team up with strangers to fight her way past undead friends and family; the staff of WWN, a newsroom that continues to broadcast amidst the outbreak; and the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Olympia, who devolve into perverse power structures as the zombies take the ship. In Act Two, we flash through eleven years from the perspective of Hoffman as she collects testimony from survivors across the country through her improvised post-apocalyptic hotline. Act Three covers the attempts of the survivors to build a new society and learn to live alongside their zombie brethren.
One of the most interesting things about this take on zombies is the way that this book refers to them. It’s become a bit of a cliché by now for authors to come up with clever new words for their supernatural creatures to avoid the prosaic “zombie” or “vampire.” But you have to remember that Romero did it first. The Living Dead seems to take place in an alternate universe in which the Romero films don’t exist, and thus the modern-day concept of zombies has not been popularized. In the beginning of the novel, a few of the characters use “ghouls”—the term used in Romero’s first movie Night of the Living Dead. However, for the most part, the zombies are just referred to as capital-T Them. By referring to zombies as Them, Romero and Kraus draw parallels to groups that have been Othered and the divides that exist within American society. Greer draws parallels between the zombies and the treatment of the Black and brown members of her mobile-home community. Fighter pilot Jenny sees the zombies as an extension of the patriarchy and sexual harassment that she experiences in the Navy. Japanese-American naval officer Nishimura relates the zombies to the specter of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Each character projects their own battles onto the zombies, but ultimately the zombies represent division.
We get a fascinating contrast in the few chapters written from the perspective of the zombies themselves. Each of these chapters is written in the second-person, highlighting another pronoun: “you.” “You” is an interesting choice because it can be both singular and plural, and doesn’t specify gender or anything else about one’s identity. The zombies share something of a collective consciousness, so “you” shrinks and expends to refer to just one zombie or multiple. There are no divisions among the zombies; each zombie is “you” and “that other you” and “all of you.” As the zombies kill more humans, their identities merge into the collective and become part of “you.” Despite this, individual zombies sometime manage to maintain parts of their identity. They often remember loved ones, return to familiar places, and even mimic old habits. Overall, though, the zombies have some important moral lessons to teach about how to live without the divisiveness that characterizes our present society.
The metaphors in The Living Dead can be a bit heavy-handed, and the moral messages aren’t quite what you might expect from a zombie book. Romero and Kraus’s outlook on humanity is quite bleak, so this isn’t your typical tale of rustic heroes triumphing over the zombie horde. But the novel does show us a glimmer of hope, and hints at how we might make society better—hopefully without having to completely destroy it and rebuild it first. I have to say, after having seen some of the best in humanity come out while we live through our own mini world-changing epidemic, I don’t know that I agree with such a pessimistic take on the apocalypse. But it was certainly fascinating to get this insight into the mind of a genre-inventing master!
You can find The Living Dead available now in stores, or purchase it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you make it through this epic tome, be sure to come back and share your thoughts with me in the comments!