Cover Released for George Romero’s The Living Dead Novel

When the godfather of the zombie genre George Romero passed away in 2017, he left behind a number of incomplete projects, including the novel The Living Dead, which author Daniel Kraus completed earlier this year. Over at Entertainment Weekly, the novel’s cover has been revealed, with the book set to hit shelves on June 9, 2020. In addition to debuting the cover, the outlet also unveiled an excerpt from the narrative. You can take a look at the cover below and head over to Entertainment Weekly‘s site to get a taste of the terror in store for readers when The Living Dead debuts on June 9, 2020.

The book is described, “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.”

Romero’s breakthrough film was 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, which helped establish and popularize the “rules” of zombies. The film was a major financial success, allowing Romero to continue to explore a world in which corpses rise from their graves in Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead. Romero even started another world in which a zombie apocalypse occurred with Diary of the Dead and Survival of the 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 previously shared. “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.”

One of the benefits that the upcoming novel has over Romero’s films is the scope of the adventure isn’t limited to a production budget, allowing the narrative to explore zombies in all corners of the globe.

“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.”

You can grab your copy of The Living Dead on June 9, 2020.

Will you be picking up the novel? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!