Romero’s Zombies Return

Love it or hate it, the notion of a zombie apocalypse has played a small but persistent part in modern popular culture for more than a half-century. Of course, the creative spirit behind this ongoing phenomenon was the late George Romero, whose 1968 indie film classic, “Night of the Living Dead,” continues to exert its influence on an entire subgenre. Zombies, of course, already had an extensive history in film, literature and legend, but Romero took matters in a new direction, bringing his undead creatures out of the realm of arcane, voodoorelated rituals and into a recognizable American world of farm houses, high rises and shopping malls. Romero would go on to write and direct five more films in his “Dead” sequence, but the template was firmly established in the first. For no reason we will ever discover, the dead have come back to life, they are hungry — and their latest incarnation comes in the form of an epic novel, “The Living Dead,” that may prove to be the definitive account of the zombie apocalypse. Romero turned to fiction relatively late in life, and “The Living Dead” remained unfinished at the time of his death in 2017. Romero’s heirs invited Daniel Kraus, novelist and lifelong Romero fan, to complete the project. While it is impossible to know, at all points, which writer wrote which passages, it’s clear that Kraus’ contribution was enormous, and that his own narrative decisions were made in the service of Romero’s vision. Despite its often grotesque violence, “The Living Dead” is, in the end, about something unexpected: the quality of mercy. History, Romero reminds us, moves through cycles, extended periods that can bring chaos and destruction before giving way to whatever comes next. Romero’s zombies are representative of one such cycle, during which we come to see them for what they have always been: essentially tragic victims caught up in a cosmic mystery that no one will ever solve. By the novel’s end, the rapidly deteriorating zombies have become figures of pathos rather than terror, while the surviving humans are forced to contend with an irrevocably altered world.