“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 … 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.
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A work of gory genius marked by all of Romero’s trademark wit, humanity, and merciless social observations. How lucky are we to have this final act of Grand Guignol from the man who made the dead walk?
The Living Dead is a sprawling, timely, scary epic that honors the zombie tradition but also goes in new directions and takes risks that pay off.
Like a lost Romero classic, which will play out on the inside of your skull long after you’ve finished it.
Wow! I don’t think I could start this review any other way…just…WOW! This book is amazing, horrifying, terrifying, and oddly realistic (if you assume the zombie apocalypse is a real thing).
As most people know, George Romero was a genius and a visionary. What you may not know is that Daniel Kraus is, as well. Despite the fact that the two men only met once, long before this collaboration became a reality, it was written as a true meeting of the minds between the two. Romero left a partially completed manuscript; Kraus was asked to finish it. Instead of just using what he’d been given and finishing it however he wanted, Kraus spent a lot of time re-watching and reading everything by Romero he could track down. As new resources came to light, changes were made to the storyline. While adding his own artistic touches, Kraus went as far as possible in making sure that Romero’s original vision for the book still shone through. I can’t say enough positive things about the integrity with which Kraus tackled finishing this book, or about the truly impressive final product.
Now, a bit about the actual book: Yes, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a Romero zombie novel. There are lots of zombies, and lots of gory, terrible things happen. However, there’s also plenty of character development along the way, as people cope with and adapt to the apocalypse. The story is told from multiple perspectives, with various different storylines that sometimes intersected, and sometimes went their own way. I enjoyed some characters more than others, but feel that everyone could find one (or more) to connect with as you read. Despite the fact that the plot is pretty much all action, all the time, there’s time to get to know the major players in the story, and come to appreciate their past experiences, personalities, and reactions to what is happening around them.
The Living Dead is so much more than a typical zombie horror novel. It’s also a commentary on the human condition, and speaks to actual issues that we’re facing today. Place yourself in the shoes of any character, and try to honestly evaluate what you’d do in that situation. Hopefully we can all walk away from this book with a desire to be better people.
Each individual storyline is compelling on its own, and is made even more so by its integration into overall plot. All the details are right, and the things that happen seem realistic given the situation. There’s a lot going on here, and I won’t go into detail to avoid spoilers.
Suffice it to say that this book is truly a work of genius. I highly recommend it to any fans of horror, Romero, post-apocalyptic fiction, and anyone interested in a fresh perspective on human nature.
Five out of five chunks of sharp cheddar!
‘The zombie virus isn’t cannibalistic, it’s antihuman.’
First of all, this is a LONG book (656 pages) and it seemed even longer than that. I don’t know that it’s ever taken me as long to finish a single book. That’s not to say it isn’t a great book because it is. It just took me forever to make my way through it.
Most of us know author George Romero’s name from the zombie movies he made, starting with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD back in the late 1960s. But he also wrote on this book over the years, not quite finishing it before he passed away in 2017.
Daniel Kraus, his co-author, had met Romero while he was alive and felt honored when Romero’s widow contacted him to see if he was interested in finishing the book. Well, heck yes, he was.
The writing was pretty seamless, at least to me. I am not sure at all which author wrote which parts of the book. Kraus spent a lot of time researching Romero’s works and he definitely paid a great homage to Romero with this finished book.
There is never a reason given for the dead coming back to life in this book. I’m glad about that because, as a reader, you’re able to draw your own conclusions.
The story goes back and forth among different living characters – a black teenage girl, the San Diego coroner and his assistant coroner, a naval officer about an aircraft carrier, a statistician, and more. I enjoyed this approach because each character added their own perspective on the undead – and the living.
I enjoyed the characters. I enjoyed the story – even as long as it is. The ending chapters were a surprise that I didn’t see coming but I enjoyed that too.
It reminded me in some ways of WORLD WAR Z but it’s unique in its own way.
If you’ve watched Romero’s films over the years and/or a zombie fan, you owe it to yourself to read this Romero/Kraus collaboration.
I received this book from Tor Books through Net Galley in the hopes that I would read it and leave an unbiased review.
From the creative minds of Romero & Kraus comes a long awaited version of written zombie lore only these two authors can perfect, delivering all the characterization and carnage only a true dedicated fan could handle is now the gift that keeps on giving.
George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus brings forth a new novel where dead people quit staying dead and begin eating the living. Known by many names, Them, ghouls, biters and zombies. These two authors conceive brilliant intertwined storylines exploiting the infiltration of The Living Dead. Not holding back on creativity, gore and characterization definitely establishes many unpredictable tense moments for the reader. Growing up watching Romero’s zombie films and his movie magic should be a definite motivation to further explore this masterpiece. This extensive apocalyptic epic comes in at a whopping 650 pages that provide hours of bloody good zombie times. 5 stars
I am a huge zombie fan, so when I saw this book at the bookstore, I just HAD to have it. I am not quite sure what I was expecting from it, but it was way different than I thought it would be.
As with most zombie books, or movies, or TV shows, don’t get attached to anyone. That should be a no-brainer. LOL. It was well written and very graphic, as a good zombie book should be. The thing that has me on the edge about this story though is the authors’ take on Zombies.
In this book, Zombies aren’t mindless beings. They aren’t just driven to want to eat. They actually think and are almost like a collective unconscious. They can communicate with each other, which really threw me off.
It was also difficult to read in some places, confusing. There were times I had to go back and re-read some areas just to be sure I was following correctly.
All in all, it was a good story. It was very creative and… I’m not sure I want to say entertaining because that doesn’t sound right for such a dark book (lol). We will go with captivating. I enjoyed this book very much though and recommend it to those who love twisted stories and would like a new take on Zombies.
It starts with one dead body. John Doe. However, he doesn’t stay dead. It’s happening everywhere. The dead are coming back to life and attacking people. Those people die and come back to life. Some try to spread the information to others as quickly as they learn it but many do not realize what’s happening until they see it themselves. Mistakes are made as people try to figure out how to act in these conditions. Some people rise to be leaders. Some try to help others. Some let their worst internal desires, ones that have been pushed down for so long, finally be released and acted upon.
I love books/movies/tv shows about zombies but I’m particularly fascinated with how PEOPLE behave in these apocalyptic conditions. This book delivers on both points. The Living Dead takes us from the very beginning of the zombie apocalypse to more than a decade afterward. It gives the reader enough zombie horror and gore for those who want that but it also explores human behavior and at what point in a societal breakdown people start letting their true selves come out.
This is the first time I have ever felt sympathy for zombies. I love how Romero and Kraus kept that little bit of humanity and memory in the zombies. As we got further and further along from the start of the outbreak, this book addresses some deeper issues such as humans’ impact on the environment and other living creatures as well as our desire to hold power over others. There were some really deep messages about the way our society functions and there were parts of this book that had really inspiring messages. We also see the dark side of humans – the cruelty, the greed, the violence. To classify this as a “book about zombies” is really an injustice to this book as it is so much more. It is a long book at over 600 pages but I easily read through at least 100 pages at each sitting. This is a really intellectual take on the zombie topic and I enjoyed it from cover to cover.
To be honest, I haven’t even finished the book yet but based on what I’ve read so far it’s great. When I received this book after winning it I was surprised on how thick it was. What was even more cool was that my brother read other books by this author and wanted to read it. So far the book is absolutely great. It’s really hard to put it down. I’ve noticed that lately I’ve been pulling all-nighters just so I can read more of this book. The beginning was absolutely terrific. Obviously I expected the zombie horror but I didnt expect myself to really connect with the book. I’m not one for zombies but I’m enjoying this book. I also love the cover due to its simplicity and how you instantly connect it to zombies. I definitely recommend this book!
Romero is the Godfather of the Zombie genre and this book is ageless.
I have seen a couple of Romero’s movies when I was younger so I was pretty excited when I won a copy of this book through BookishFirst. It took me a couple of days to read it as it was long but I managed to read almost all day each day. Something I really loved was the diversity of characters. They were really well written and we got background to their stories. We even get some information on a few of the zombies which was pretty neat. As I read through, there were times where the plot felt meh and was slow. Other times, it really picked up and it had me wanting more and guessing what will happen next. Overall, it isn’t perfect and I wish there were more zombie scenes in this book. It’s pretty cinematic and the gore is there as well as just how evil humans can be. For a book that was co-authored since Romero passed before finishing it, it’s not bad. I give it 3.5 stars.
If Night of the Living Dead was the first word in the dead rising field, The Living Dead is the last word. A monumental achievement.
Every zombie movie lives in the shadow of Romero, but he never got the budget to work at the scale he deserved. Fortunately, Daniel Kraus delivers the epic book of the dead that Romero began. That shadow just got a whole lot bigger.
The Living Dead is a sprawling, massive, and mostly entertaining read, but it’s also a frustrating, nearly-700 page testament to just how little life — and originality — remains in the zombie genre. It’s been more than 50 years since George A. Romero first shocked audiences with his then-highly controversial black and white movie, Night of the Living Dead, but after five additional movies, plus ten years of Robert Kirkman’s and AMC’s The Walking Dead and assorted spin-off television series (not to mention sixteen years worth of comics and a handful of video games), and countless other zombie flicks and books, including Brian Keene’s uber-popular Bram Stoker Award-winning 2003 novel, The Rising and its spate of sequels, it’s become abundantly clear that this particular horror niche is dead.
Yet, like the zombies themselves, this particular genre continues to lurch on, its tropes transgressing to cliche as the human survivors of these undead wastelands attempt to figure out all the things its audiences know all-too well by now. We know that as surely as you kill a vampire by staking it through the heart, you must kill the zombie by shooting it in the head. We’re supposed to find suspense in characters fumbling their way into discovering all the rote genre trappings that have been ingrained in us for decades and suspend our disbelief enough to buy into a world where these characters have never even heard of a zombie. More likely, you’ll be shouting at the book, demanding the characters to stop being stupid and shoot that shambling corpse in the head already! To the dozens of characters we follow in The Living Dead, everything that is new to them is an old, worn out hat to us, and not even Romero and Kraus can find much of a pulse in these discoveries as they work their way, in checklist fashion, from one worn out conceit to the next.
By forcing a reboot on the Romero legacy of the zombie outbreak, only scantly predating Night of the Living Dead, there’s not much to be had in the way of originality or innovative ideas here. The characters and the contexts they’re placed in are, at least, interesting enough, despite being overly familiar. If you’re a regular reader of apocalyptic narratives or zombie books in general, you’re likely to find these elements irritatingly familiar, and it almost becomes a bit of a guessing game to name off all the other books that have trod similar ground previously.
The Living Dead is divided into three acts. The bulk of Act One is relayed in mosaic fashion as we’re introduced to a large number of disparate characters operating in their own disconnected environments. There’s a pair of star-crossed morgue workers, the men and women of WNN broadcasting, the Navy crew operating aboard the floating island of an aircraft carrier, the Olympia, and a teenage girl who wakes up to find her trailer park neighbors in a sudden war against the undead.
Taking up more than half of the book’s entire page count, Act One eventually devolves into a slog of familiarity as well-worn plot devices are repurposed and only occasionally given if not a face lift, then a minor bit of nip and tuck here and there. Act Two, blessedly, is much shorter and far more interesting as it condenses more than a decade of post-zombie apocalypse history into a handful of pages, moving us beyond the chronology of Romero’s films as depicted in Land of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Act Three takes us a full fifteen years into the future, with the survivors from the preceding acts attempting to establish a new civilization.
For as much as The Living Dead aggravated me, and too often left me yearning for other books to read despite being bound and determined to finish this damn epic, there were a number of high points to be found. Even if the parallels the authors’ attempt to draw between cell phones, social media, and zombification feel a bit too much like Old Man Yells At Clouds syndrome (and the simple fact that Stephen King already wrote that book with 2006’s Cell), their explorations of human nature and our place within the ecosystem, and their ruminations on the environment we all populate, were refreshingly thoughtful and welcome. I have no doubt, too, that a number of other readers will decry this hefty tome for being “too political,” outing themselves as a Johnny-come-lately to the works of George A. Romero, zombie fiction in general, and horror in particular. Make no mistake, it certainly is political, deliberately and keenly so. To me, this is a welcome aspect and plays a central role to the book’s theme. One character, Etta Hoffman, is responsible for cataloging the zombie apocalypse and recording the stories of these survivors, capturing the particular sentiments of a time and place, which just so happens to be the here and now, and good lord, is there ever a lot to say about present-day America, not all of it good or even particularly flattering nowadays. The racist and bigoted brigade of Red Hats among us will make plenty of hay over the number of minority characters that feature prominently throughout, and they will no doubt find plenty of other things to be ticked off about here, too, including copious amounts of shade thrown at their orange, small-handed Dear Leader. To that I can only say, good, fuck ‘em. I loved how openly and flagrantly political this book was, from its first pages right on through to its last.
While The Living Dead is much too long, and occasionally suffers for it, oftentimes feeling like an absolute slog to get through, much of its final act is an absolutely potent gut punch. There were moments that made me ache and left me feeling miserable, and I expect a number of other readers to be turned off by the darkly pessimistic detours Kraus takes these characters through. It is, however, a wholly fitting, and purely Romero-esque, finish that echoes the despair of the 1950 film that started us down this entire path. As a posthumous work, I can’t help but feel it’s ultimately a fitting and worthy eulogy to Romero’s films and reflections on society. I have little doubt that if Romero, who died in July 2017, had lived through these last few years of the Trump presidency, his finale to The Living Dead would echo Kraus’s finish in complete synchronicity. The end point, though, remains the same and its final message is certainly an appropriate one in these days of bitter political divides and tribal in-fighting. We all — each of us — need to do better, and be better. Otherwise, for now at least, the dead win.
I am a fan of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead so I was super excited to have a chance to read The Living Dead A New Novel. With bated breath I hoped to find a new favorite quote to rival the famed “They’re coming to get you Margret.” Unfortunately I did not find a new quote that lived up to the one from the movie, but I did get some amusement from seeing the old one pop up from time to time in the novel.
It’s a good book for Romero zombie fans. I enjoyed the characters and being able to see how the zombie infestation began, ran it’s course, and ultimately ended. I was a little disappointed with the reasoning behind the zombie disease and felt that it was a little too political in those regards. Like his movies, this one has lots of blood and lots of gore.