Night of the Living Dead co-writer has written a new zombie novel

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

While NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD director George A. Romero went on to make several more zombie films (DAWN, DAY, LAND, DIARY, and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD), NIGHT co-writer John A. Russo's further contributions to the world they created together have come primarily in the form of novels and comic books – most notably his 1977 novel RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. When the cinematic version of RETURN came out in 1985 and was nothing like his book, Russo then wrote a novelization of the film.

In the late '90s, it was announced that Russo was going to be producing a zombie movie titled CHILDREN OF THE LIVING DEAD. But when a movie with that title was released in 2001, the plot was nothing like the one Russo had originally come up with, and the finished film was so bad that the director even apologized for it.

Now it looks like Russo has gotten another chance to tell the story he conceived for CHILDREN OF THE LIVING DEAD, as the description of his new novel EPIDEMIC OF THE LIVING DEAD sounds a lot like the plot that was originally announced for the CHILDREN movie:

It starts with infected needles. It spreads like a plague. Soon the town of Chapel Grove, Pennsylvania, is overrun with cannibalistic corpses. Some are taken down with a bullet to the brain. Others, torched like kindling. But a few have survived—inside a maternity ward…
 
Detective Bill Curtis manages to rescue his pregnant wife Lauren from the ward in the nick of time. But the other pregnant women are not so lucky. Some of them have been bitten — and infected. Now it’s anyone’s guess what’s growing inside them…
 
But the nightmare isn’t over yet. The infected mothers’ newborns appear to be normal. But as the years go by, Bill and Lauren Curtis begin to worry about their beautiful, healthy daughter Jodie. Jodie is drawn to the town’s “special” children, the ones whose mothers were bitten. They’re reaching adolescence now. Their hormones are raging. And they’re starting to possess strange appetitites…

That's an intriguing set-up that should have been brought to the screen 17 years ago instead of the disaster that was the actual CHILDREN OF THE LIVING DEAD movie. I'm interested in finding out what happens with those children of zombie-bitten mothers.

If you're as interested as I am, you can order a copy of the 272 page novel EPIDEMIC OF THE LIVING DEAD from Amazon.