Ah – zombies. They just won’t lie down and die, will they?
Since the adaptation of The Walking Dead into a TV series (currently 10 seasons, with spinoffs, and counting) they seem to have been resurrected once more into the cultural spotlight.
The ideas of zombies have been around for hundreds of years, but I guess in modern culture the name that springs to mind first is George A Romero. Co-writer and director of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and a number of sequels, he was the inspiration for Walking Dead and hundreds of other books, films and television programmes. Whereas zombies up to this point mainly stayed motionless or at best shuffled about at a slow pace, Romero’s zombies could run – fast, with gruesome results. And this inspired what we see and read today.
When George died in 2017, he evidently left behind much unfinished material. This book was one of them. Scriptwriter Daniel Kraus, who also wrote the novelisation Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, was given the responsibility of finishing the project.
Written in relatively short chapters, it is gripping from the start. The book is in three parts (which suggests a film/screenwriter’s structure). The first part is how the events of the 23rd October – here after referred to as 10/23 – first happen and the two weeks immediately afterwards. There is no warning, nor any particular reason, but suddenly bodies start coming back to life. The style of this one is (I’m assuming deliberately) in blockbuster-type mode, in that the book begins with a large range of characters, who in typical film-like fashion begin as separate story lines but eventually entwine.
Etta Hoffman is an autistic medical computer programmer who notices an influx of medical records that show people dying more than once. Then we have Luis Acocella, an assistant medical examiner who with his diener assistant Charlene (Charlie) Rutkowski has a cadaver come back to life on a mortuary table. Greer Morgan is an African-American teenager living on a trailer park in Bulk, Missouri, who suddenly finds her friends and family turn into zombies once bitten. Chuck Corso, nicknamed “The Face”, is a news cable anchor on WNN who with his tough news director Nathan Baseman reports live as things happen and becomes a beacon of news when other networks disappear. Lastly, Karl Nishimura is an officer on the aircraft carrier USS Olympia which is heading back to San Diego when things change…
The results are gruesome and effective. For those who like their horror gory, there’s enough rending, gnashing, tearing and gobbling to keep you happy.
The second part moves us on fifteen years after the initial outbreak. Here things become more like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, in that the zombies now outnumber the living. However there seems to have been adjustment to a new reality, on both sides. The zombies now seem to have mainly slowed down into a life of decay and immobility.
The humans have begun to establish enclaves such as “Fort York”, where there is some sort of strange co-existence between them and the zombies. Although there are groups of humans on patrol and scavenging resources from amongst the rubble of the cities, in the main peaceful coexistence seems to be the way forward. However, the arrival of Richard Lindof, a Trump-like character, appears trying to re-establish the old order and divisions occur.
Overall, The Living Dead is a remarkable distillation of the zombie genre which covers pretty much everything that a reader would want in a zombie novel. It is both chilling and effective. Can you tell who wrote what in this joint project? No, and that’s what impresses (although it seems clear in the Afterword that much of the graft was Daniel’s.) I’m fairly sure that the often lyrical nature of the prose is perhaps Kraus’s work. Generally, it works very well and there’s a level of detail that makes this feel like the authors know their stuff. For example:
“Anytime he opened the chest of a corpse, the vivid colors and textures beneath seemed excited to finally show off. The confetti of sinew sprayed by a bone saw; the blinding brightness of blood; the wet wink of the brain; the bloomed chrysanthemums of mammary glands; the balloon-animal arteries of the heart; the high-fashion leather satchel of the stomach; the golden surprise of the pancreas. His rational mind knew these were not celebrations. They were the first blushes of the mushrooming spoil to come.”
There’s also some nice Easter eggs related to George’s work throughout as well – I’ll not give an example, as it is more fun finding them yourself. Daniel does mention a few of them in his Afterword, also explaining how the book builds on not just the films but also George’s ideas. Rather than being just a gore-fest, this one touches on topics as wide-ranging as violence and race in society, capitalism, the relevance and importance of the media and even the purpose of existence.
On the negative side of things, you may struggle to suspend disbelief at how all these disparate characters cross paths, although this is something that often happens in such novels. Overall, the focus is on the USA/Canada, with few mentions of the world outside North America. This may be a good thing, however. Most annoying for me was the minor British stereotype character who has clearly been to the Dick van Dyke school of acting – “! believe you’ll be the blighter to do it, love, certain as green apples,” this character says at one point, clearly having been transplanted from the London Blitz to 21st century Nottinghamshire. Thankfully, such transgressions are few.
The ending may please some readers and infuriate others. There is a definite nod to Romero’s pessimism – the human race do themselves few favours here – although at the same time, there is simultaneously a glimpse of hope, a point I quite liked.
I’ve said before that Zombies are not my favourite horror creature. But, even allowing for this, The Living Dead seriously impresses, grabbing my attention straightaway and keeping my interest. There’s a weight and a depth to this that shows both respect for the material for Romero and for the genre. The authors know what readers want – and deliver. Pleasingly impressive.
The Living Dead by George A Romero and Daniel Kraus
Published by Bantam Press, August 2020
656 pages
ISBN: 978-1787633919
Review by Mark Yon.
When the second paragraph betrays the fact that the author possibly has never seen a Romero film, and glosses over the entire origin of the term “zombie” in it’s modern iteration(an important note in terms of Romero’s impact on the use ofnthe term) , I stopped reading.
Let somebody who knows what he’s talking about take the reins next time bub.
To be fair, John, the co-author at the end of the book explains in some detail how much work was done in terms of personal research, as well as using the research of others and working with Romero’s family to bring this to a conclusion. He’s clearly a big fan who wants to do a good job. Much of the first part is, I think, direct from Romero himself. To me, most, but not all of it, admittedly, works.