by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus

Bantam Press, out now

 

A pair of medical examiners find themselves facing a dead man who won’t stay dead. In a Midwestern trailer park, an African American teenage girl and a Muslim immigrant battle newly-risen friends and family. It’s the end of the world, we just didn’t realise.

This weighty horror epic from the late George Romero had not been completed when the director passed away in 2017 and his estate employed The Shape of Water co-writer Daniel Kraus to complete the project. It’s to his credit that the joins are not apparent, and in a lengthy afterword we find out more about the process of stitching together George’s existing prose, pages of notes and content from a tricky-to-find subscription website.

Before we go any further, it’s probably worth explaining what the novel isn’t. It’s not, as some speculated, a resequencing of all six Living Dead movies into a single narrative. Quite apart from that being very tricky to get a throughline, this is not a novelisation, rather a journey of individuals and their journeys to hell. We’re with the same people at the end as the beginning, meaning that when the sucker punches come (and they do) we have built up empathy for the characters.

Split into three sections, Act 1 does most of the heaving lifting, covering off the first few days within 400 pages. Act 2 then has the gargantuan task of squeezing 11 years into 28 pages, before the final push, Act 3, which takes 190 pages to conclude the last days. It’s an unusual structure, the strongest section being the first as the world begins to fall down around our characters. The copy is written with a real momentum, tightly edited so that incident breathlessly follows incident.

But while this is a lengthy read, spanning over a decade, it doesn’t go epic at the expense of the characters. True, this is a worldwide disaster, but our focus is very much on those in front of us as they try to dodge the next onslaught. There’s also an interesting set of chapters written from the perspective of the living dead, getting inside their heads, understanding their motivations and just how sentient they are.

Verdict: One wonders whether the world’s current condition will impact on the number of readers who fancy diving into an epic tale of a global pandemic. But the Romero fans won’t care, having waited a long time for this. It’s true to the director’s spirit, and a worthy final chapter in the definitive zombie series. 8/10

Nick Joy

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