The Living Dead

“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 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books

1018919488
The Living Dead

“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 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books

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The Living Dead

The Living Dead

Unabridged — 27 hours, 13 minutes

The Living Dead

The Living Dead

Unabridged — 27 hours, 13 minutes

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Overview

“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 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books


Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Danielle Trussoni

…[gives] Romero fans a final experience of his particular vision of a zombie apocalypse. And what an apocalypse it is! Panoramic and sweeping, The Living Dead is a smorgasbord of the undead, a book that will give even the most ardent zombie lovers their fix.

Publishers Weekly

03/30/2020

Filmmaker Romero (1940–2017), best known for Night of the Living Dead, offers a sweeping look at the rise, fall, and rebirth of humanity in the face of a zombie menace in this long-winded horror novel, posthumously completed by Kraus (Bent Heavens). Patient zero appears in “the early months of the 21st century,” when a John Doe is registered to the U.S. Census Bureau twice: once upon his death and again after the medical examiner shoots his reawakened body. From there the virus spreads, reaching a large but underdeveloped cast, among them a teenager living in a trailer park, a news anchor who sequesters himself in his studio to continuously broadcast news of the zombie panic even after he’s no longer sure if anyone’s watching, and a chaplain aboard the USS Olympia who slowly goes mad. Throughout, the zombie threat is granted its own, second-person perspective: “You are hungry. You wake up. In that order.” In this innovation alone Romero paints a fresher picture of the zombie apocalypse, following the zombie’s perspective 15 years into the future to examine the lifespan and evolution of the creatures. Otherwise, this doorstopper reads like an extended cut of Romero’s horror films. This belabored amalgamation of zombie tropes is epic but familiar. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (June)

From the Publisher

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.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song

“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.”—Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

“Like a lost Romero classic, which will play out on the inside of your skull long after you've finished it.”—Clive Barker

“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?”—Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman

“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.”—Grady Hendrix, author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism

"[A] phenomenally enrapturing and reverberating work of art. Vividly illuminates the minds of the characters.”—Booklist on The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus

Library Journal

04/01/2020

Horror novelist and lifelong Romero fan Kraus (with Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water) "collaborated" with the late, great zombie filmmaker Romero to complete this epic work that incorporates "Easter eggs"' from across Romero's oeuvre. The novel spans from a few days before the start of the zombie apocalypse through the following 15 years. Drawing from Romero's papers, interviews, films, and exhaustive research, and with his own storytelling prowess, Kraus completes a zombie tale for the ages. Written from multiple points of view and featuring a diverse cast of characters, this lengthy tome is made accessible via short chapters that keep the pace moving briskly. The zombies are terrifyingly realistic, but it is the well-developed human characters that readers will appreciate, particularly Etta Hoffmann, autistic researcher and archivist of the apocalypse. This is a rare gem of a story, one that pays homage to its varied source material across numerous films, books, comics, and more, while also standing on its own merits. Kraus's extensive author's note adds appeal. VERDICT A true gift to horror fans. Pairs well with Nights of the Living Dead, edited by Romero and others, with appeal for fans of apocalyptic epics such as Chuck Wendig's Wanderers and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

Kirkus Reviews

2020-03-30
The last testament of the legendary filmmaker is a sprawling novel about the zombie apocalypse that dwarfs even his classic movie cycle.

Though this long-simmering novel was unfinished when Romero died in 2017, his estate turned its completion over to Kraus, an adept novelist and collaborator with Guillermo Del Toro. The result is a satisfying, terrifying chronicle of the zombie crisis that includes explosive set pieces and moving character beats in equal measure. Just before Halloween, the first cadaver appears in the lab of San Diego medical examiners Luis Acocella and Charlie Rutkowski, asking the pair “Shall we dance?” even as Charlie holds his heart in her hands. In rural Missouri, teenager Greer Morgan soon learns society’s rules have been drastically altered by the rise of the dead. The growing severity of the crisis is seen at a national television studio in Atlanta, where conceited anchor Chuck Corso finds the danger growing closer and closer. On the aircraft carrier USS Olympia, helmsman Karl Nishimura and pilot Jenny Pagán join forces when they’re trapped between the resurrected dead and the zealous chaplain convinced God wants him to lead a death cult. These harrowing survival stories are marked by cinematic spectacles—a bloody escape by jet fighter, a school shooting, and fragments told from the zombies’ point of view are among the memorable episodes—but Kraus injects a dramatic dose of human pathos into the mix as characters bond, fight for survival, and frequently die so that others may live. By the time these disparate characters converge in the last act after a significant time jump, readers will know them so well that each loss takes on more emotional weight. Less soapy than The Walking Dead and less inventive than Max Brooks’ World War Z, it’s still a spectacular horror epic laden with Romero’s signature shocks and censures of societal ills.

A blockbuster portrayal of the zombie apocalypse and a fitting tribute to the genre’s imaginative progenitor.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940173319395
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Publication date: 08/04/2020
Edition description: Unabridged
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