The Living Dead: George A. Romero novel reaches paperback in September

The Living Dead, the novel legendary filmmaker George A. Romero was writing in his last days and which Daniel Kraus completed after Romero passed away, has been available in hardcover – with a page count of 656! – since last August. (Buy a copy HERE.) There’s also an 18 hour, unabridged audiobook narrated by Lori Cardille (Day of the Dead) and Bruce Davison (Willard 1971), and you can get that HERE. But if you’ve been waiting for a paperback release, we now know when that will be available: September 7th. Copies can be pre-ordered at THIS LINK.

The Living Dead has the following 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.

There’s also this synopsis:

On October 24th, John Doe rises from the dead. Assistant Medical Examiner Luis Acocella and his assistant Charlene Rutkowksi are vivisecting him when it happens, and so begins a global nightmare beyond comprehension.

Greer Morgan is a teenager living in a trailer park, and when the dead begin their assault, the true natures of her neighbors are revealed. Chuck Chaplin is a pretty-boy cable-news anchor, and the plague brings sudden purpose to his empty life.

Karl Nishimura is the helmsman of the U.S.S. Vindicator, a nuclear submarine, and he battles against a complete zombie takeover of his city upon the sea. And meanwhile, a mysterious woman named Etta Hoffmann records the progress of the epidemic from a bunker in D.C., as well as the broken dreams and stubborn hopes of a nation not ready to give up.

Spread across three separate time periods and combining Romero’s biting social commentary with Kraus’s gift for the beautiful and grotesque, the book rockets forward as the zombie plague explodes, endures, and finally, in a shocking final act, begins to radically change.

Although Romero is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, I still haven’t had the chance to sit down and experience The Living Dead. I’m undecided on whether I’ll be getting the paperback or the audiobook… maybe I’ll just end up getting both of them.