Kraus’ solution? Try to think like Romero. But I had all these different islands that he had created, and I had to build bridges between them.” “It would’ve been much easier if he had written half the book and stopped, you know?” Kraus says. What the author’s note doesn’t really get into are the challenges of fitting Kraus’ style together with Romero’s - especially given that the material Kraus had to work with was so fragmentary. Throughout, the authors adopt varying stylistic approaches, shifting from broad overviews to intense individual moments of terror as they chart the saga of modern civilization’s death and tentative rebirth. Later, the story jumps ahead to reckon with the devastating aftermath of the initial outbreak. The story begins at the start of a zombie plague, capturing the hectic early days of the apocalypse from the perspectives of a handful of very different human characters: a news anchor, a trailer-park teen, a medical examiner’s assistant, a Navy helmsman, a low-level bureaucrat, and others. The final version of The Living Dead is big - nearly 700 pages long - and audacious. All told, Kraus estimates that about half of the text in the final version of The Living Dead was either directly written or at least plotted by Romero. And then about halfway through the writing process, Roe sent Kraus an old letter from Romero, outlining some general ideas for the book. He found a short story too, written from a zombie’s point of view. While researching Romero’s history as a prose writer, Kraus also discovered two chapters from an earlier attempt at a zombie novel that Romero briefly tried to serialize online in 2000. After Romero died, Roe asked Kraus if he could do something with the big chunk of The Living Dead Romero left behind, which was only “about a third” of what would become the final manuscript. As he explains in an author’s note at the end of the book, Kraus’ one encounter with Romero came courtesy of the filmmaker’s manager, Chris Roe, who happened to have grown up with Kraus in Fairfield, Iowa. Kraus is also used to collaborating with creators who have strong personal styles, having previously co-written the book versions of Trollhunters and The Shape of Water with their creator, Guillermo del Toro.īut The Living Dead was a different kind of project for Kraus, because he had to not just work with someone else’s ideas, but had to interpret his intentions. Kraus is the author of several popular young-adult fantasy novels, including Rotters, the story of a teenage grave-robber, and two volumes of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, the story of a dead kid who gets resurrected. “They’re my Star Wars,” Kraus says, in a phone interview from his Chicago home. It’s even more fitting that the work would be posthumously completed by Kraus, a writer and documentary filmmaker who’s been obsessed with Romero’s zombie oeuvre since his mother showed him Night of the Living Dead when he was 6. There’s something oddly apt about George Romero completing a novel (and a zombie novel, no less) from beyond the grave. A month after his death, Kraus set out to complete Romero’s final project: his long-gestating debut novel, The Living Dead. Eleven years later, the man who directed Night of the Living Dead, creating the zombie-movie genre as we know it, died of lung cancer. Novelist Daniel Kraus only met his hero George Romero once, at a horror convention circa 2006.
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