The Book Of The Dead

When king of the Zombies George Romero died, he left behind an unfinished novel. Author Daniel Kraus tells us how he went about completing it

- Ian Berriman

It’s three years since George Romero – who, with Night Of The Living Dead, created the modern zombie genre – passed away, but we’re about to see more of the fruits of his imagination, with a novel he’d partially written set for posthumous publication.

Lifelong fan Daniel Kraus, who previously teamed with Guillermo del Toro on the Trollhunters books, was the man entrusted by Romero’s widow and agent with completing The Living Dead. “It was something he worked on over the last decade of his life, returning to it now and again,” Kraus tells SFX. To complicate matters, Romero also had an earlier stab at it. In 2000, he released chapters of a novel titled The Death Of Death to subscribers – but gave up after 100 pages. “So we had materials from both that original attempt and his much later attempt at starting over.”

The author describes the project as “a George Romero/Daniel Kraus collaboration”. That may seem an odd choice of words, but he says the process was comparable to his partnership with del Toro. “It was more similar than you’d think. When this began I had a chunk of pages that George had written, and I began work. Months passed and we dug up this whole other section he’d written, that we didn’t know about.