Craig Zablo

Before he died George Romero was working on a zombie novel.  Daniel Kraus (co-author of The Shape of Water novel with Guillermo Del Toro) has been hired to pull together Romero’s final zombie tale.  Kraus is excited about working on this project…

“I could talk all day about George. He’s the reason I’m a writer… Some of [the book] 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…

“What’s exciting about the novel, though, is…It’s huge. It’s a massively scaled story, a real epic, the kind no one ever gave him the budget for in film. 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.”

The Living Dead will be released by Tor in Fall 2019.  Here’s a synopsis:

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.”

Sources: Entertainment Weekly and /Film.