George Romero’s ‘The Living Dead’ Novel Being Completed for 2019 Release

The horror community lost a true legend last year with the passing of George Romero, who gave audiences films like Creepshow, Martin, The Crazies and helped define the zombie subgenre with his seminal Night of the Living Dead and its three sequels. Romero’s death not only meant that we’d never get a new film from the icon, but he also left behind a slew of unfinished projects in various mediums. In a sense, Romero will come back from the dead, as writer Daniel Kraus will complete Romero’s abandoned novel The Living Dead.

“I could talk all day about George. He’s the reason I’m a writer. He might be the reason I’m interested in art, period,” Kraus shared with Entertainment Weekly. “When I think back on all the artists who might have inspired me, I feel so lucky and so thankful that it was George — for his sense of humanity, his unacceptance of social injustice, his adamant refusal to let the human race off the hook.”

Dating back to 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, Romero never had the luxury of working with massive budgets. Even after his successes, studios still doubted his visions could become as profitable as other horror films. The result was intimate stories told in undead wastelands, but Kraus claims The Living Dead depicts another side of Romero’s imagination.

“What’s exciting about the novel, though, is how it goes the opposite direction,” Kraus added. “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.”

Kraus admitted that, while many sequences in the novel are nearly ready to be published, other elements of the narrative are loose sketches of the story.

The book’s synopsis is as follows:

“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.”

The Living Dead is slated for release in the fall of 2019 by Tor.

[H/T Entertainment Weekly]