Release of George A. Romero’s novel The Living Dead moves to August

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

George A. Romero's novel The Living Dead has been available for pre-order for several months now (you can pre-order a copy HERE), but it's going to be released a little later than expected. Although Tor Books had previously announced a June 9, 2020 release date, the publisher has now said that they will be giving the book a hardcover and digital release on August 4th.

That's just an extra two month wait, so it's not too bad.

The Living Dead wasn't finished when Romero passed away in 2017, so his manager Chris Roe and wife Suzanne Desrocher Romero asked Daniel Kraus, who co-wrote the THE SHAPE OF WATER novel with Guillermo del Toro, to finish the book for them.

Set in present day, the book has a page count of 656. The synopsis: 

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.

Knauf has said that Romero's vision for The Living Dead was 

huge. It’s a massively scaled story, a real epic, the kind no one ever gave him the budget for in film. In a book, of course, there is no budget, and in his pages you can feel his joy of being able, at last, to do every single thing he wanted."

I look forward to checking it out in August.