The Living Dead by George A Romero and Daniel Kraus

The Living Dead by George A. Romero
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time taken to read - as able over 3 days

Pages - 656

Publisher - Bantam Press

Source - 656

Blurb from Goodreads

Set in the present day, The Living Dead is an entirely new tale, the story of the zombie plague as George A. Romero wanted to tell it.

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.


My Review

If you follow my Goodreads or any of my accounts or just know me you KNOW I LOVE Zombies, movies, books - can't get enough. Romero movies I grew up with and when I heard this was a book he had a hand in, TAKE MY MONEY!!!

I was planning on keeping this until October for my themed reads but I couldn't wait and had to dive in. I always said if I wrote a zombie book I would want it starting or cataloged at a hospital, this is close enough, a morgue.

It spreads quickly and we visit a handful of characters as the outbreak hits and how they react and try to survive the undead. A teenager in a trailer park - crime, poverty racism and now battling to stay alive. A government employee, a pilot trying to prove her worth among the sailors and finding comfort with the carriers priest despite being an unbeliever, hoping the infection won't reach their vessel. A news station, staying online as long as possible, reporting on the stories as they get them. And in Washington, an employee logging all the information of the outbreak as she gets it, staying to the very end to ensure everything is catalogued, as long as people reach out - she has a job to do.

A very mixed bag of characters, I have read and watched a fair amount of zombie stories. This one has the usual themes we see in them all but also a few wee new surprises that I hadn't seen or read before. Romero has given so much so to have this is just the icing on the cake - I would love to have a story, written, delving into the "Day of the Dead" characters, Doctor "Frankenstein" the soldiers, BUB (although I felt in this book we had a wee glimpse or nod to Bub and how he was different to his other fellow zombies). Maybe Kraus will try his hand at something like that, who wouldn't love to hear Bub's story and after reading this I think he well could be the man for the job. 4.5/5 for me, fingers and toes crossed this is something he would consider, I am now aware he has other books out there so will have a nosey at his works and see what he writes. If you are a zombie fan you really need to sink your teeth into this (see what I did there :P sorry, not sorry!).

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