31 Days of Halloween: The Living Dead (2020)

In the early 2010s I had the opportunity of a lifetime working as a guest liaison at the Comiccon in both Ottawa and Montreal. It offered me the unique opportunity of working with some of the many actors that I grew up watching. Never in my life would I have thought I’d be breathing the same air as Peter Cullen, or cracking jokes with Robert Englund. I have many fond memories working with Kane Hodder, Tom Savini, as well as Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly, and Ellen Sandweiss (of Evil Dead fame) One of the most remarkable people I met along the way was George Romero in 2014. He was by far one of the nicest, most endearing people I worked with. He had a genuine love for his fans and I was deeply saddened when he passed away a few years later.

Back in 2014, a lot of fans were wondering when he was going to make his next zombie epic. At the time, Romero had released Empire of the Dead, a comic book published by Marvel Comics. Still, George would tell his fans that he had at least one more story that he wanted to tell but was waiting for the right time to do it. When George passed away in 2017, I figured that was it, but some of his most devoted friends and colleagues have pressed on and tried to get the last of George’s zombie epics to life. Presently, long time Romero collaborator, Matt Birman, has been trying to get the ball rolling of one last zombie film, Road of the Dead. There have been a lot of challenges along the way. As I write this, Bloody Disgusting recently did an interview with Matt and his production has been stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Still, the pandemic has not stopped all the efforts to get George’s work out to the world. The past August saw the release of The Living Dead a book that was started by George and finished by writer Daniel Krause. This book came to be thanks to the efforts of Chris Roe, George’s agent. I dealt directly with Chris when I worked with George back in 2014. Dealing with agents is a reality when you’re working a convention and they are all different. Some are hands-on, some aren’t. Chris Roe is a rarity in my experience. He wasn’t just there to oversee things at a convention. The guy genuinely cared about his clients, he knew their body of work, and he cared about delivering fans a great experience. According to this write up from Polygon, Living Dead would not exist if not for the efforts of Chris Roe. The man deserves so much respect for keeping George’s legacy alive.

However, the source material of Living Dead was incomplete and so Chris looked to an old friend and writer Daniel Kraus to finish writing George’s opus. Kraus has had a long career of writing horror fiction including the novelization of two films by Guillermo del Toro. His own works include Scowlers, Rotters, and The Death of Zebulon Finch series. He’s also dabbled in comic books writing The Autumnal for Vault Comics (a great indie press that publishes mostly horror and science fiction comics that you totally should check out)

Admittedly, prior to Living Dead, I had not read anything Daniel Kraus had written. However, he nails this book. This book is a modern masterpiece. It captures the essence of every Romero zombie film. The story is less about the zombies and more about the people trying to make sense in a world gone mad. While the greater narrative of the story follows the zombie apocalypse from patient zero to the total collapse of society, it zeroes in on the lives of individual people. Just like the many Dead movies, the greater narrative is told around the personal lives of those affected by it. The story jumps from various characters including a mortician, a high school student, a news anchor, a naval officer, even a statistician of all things. The latter, a character named Etta Hoffman is the most fascinating. If you told me that the most interesting character in a zombie movie was a sheltered statistician who spends her time keeping records during a massive outbreak, I wouldn’t have believed you.

The story also focuses on a number of visible minorities, marginalized individuals, and — I think for the first time in a Romero story — characters who are gender fluid. This is pure Romero where those were seen as “less than” in our society are the primary protagonists. If you’ve got a problem with that, then you never really understood Romero’s work. This of course also plays into moments where characters find themselves dealing with the same pre-zombie bigotries and ultimately raises the question as to who the real monsters are.

I must also comment on Daniel Kraus with his descriptions of the undead. The descriptions of the undead are raw and visceral and at times downright medical in the description but not in such a way you don’t understand what’s going on. In typical Romero fashion, the zombies are a slow burn with the creatures taking a back seat to start until the end when our characters are dealing with overwhelming swarms of the creatures.

It’s a long book, clocking in at 700 pages and while it starts slow things start going at a break-neck speed as the omnipresent threat of the living dead becomes suffocating inescapable horror. It shows the fall of society in a way that George never really got to tell in his movies. George had to settle with snapshots of the zombie conquest from the point of view of a group of closely-knit groups. This story however is a game-changer. While it still tells a larger story with smaller vignettes it allows for more narrative voices that don’t necessarily intersect through the story.

I also like how the book explores the bureaucratic side of a zombie outbreak. You’d figure something like that would be kind of boring, but it is by far one of the most fascinating parts of the story. Often when you’re dealing in pandemic fiction, they seldom explore what would happen in our increasingly interconnected world. Where most stories would simply have the internets and cellphones stop working and just shrug, this story takes a more interesting angle and focusing on a character who not only tries to information flowing but also starts reaching out to survivors.

I strongly recommend this book which you can order now wherever you buy books both physically or digitally.

Tomorrow….

My next recommendation is quite the mouthful.