Night Of The Living Dead director George A. Romero has a horror novel coming out posthumously this year – after his death in 2017 aged 77.
Romero created the Night Of The Living Dead franchise with the original film in the series in 1968, and has since been regarded as a titan of the zombie movie genre.
Later in his career, he broke into books and collaborated with author Daniel Kraus on the horror novel The Living Dead, published three years after Romero’s death.
Now another novel co-written by the two men, Pay The Piper, is slated to be released sometime this autumn, according to People.
The book follows a Louisiana town whose residents are menaced by a child-killing swamp creature – forcing them to confront their nefarious ancestral history.
Renée Pontiac, the nine-year-old main character, is one of the townspeople in the fictional Louisiana backwater of Alligator Point.
She escapes her troubled home life with an alcoholic father by retreating into books, such as the works of British horror maestro HP Lovecraft.
When children begin to be murdered by a swamp creature called the Piper, all the horror stories Renée heard about the monster seem to be confirmed.
The townspeople ultimately have to face the memory of their own ancestors – the Pirates Lafitte, a band of slave traders.
Daniel Kraus, who has also collaborated with Guillermo Del Toro, brought Pay The Piper to completion with the help of the Romero estate.
Kraus discovered Romero’s manuscript for Pay The Piper among the late filmmaker’s papers at the University Of Pittsburgh library.
Romero died in July 2017 at the age of 77, after what his family described as a ‘brief but aggressive battle with cancer.’
Night Of The Living Dead was his first feature film, made on the cheap with simple special effects and a budget of just $114,000.
The movie burst onto the scene in 1968 and shocked audiences, becoming a runaway hit in spite of critics who complained of the gore.
Romero continued making movies in the franchise and established himself as a long-running beloved icon of the horror genre.
Despite his association with zombie movies in particular, he turned down an offer to direct multiple episodes of the smash AMC series The Walking Dead.
‘I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism, and I find that missing in what’s happening now,’ he told The Big Issue, dismissing The Walking Dead as ‘just a soap opera with a zombie occasionally.’
Romero was survived by his widow Suzanne Desrocher Romero, as well as their son Andrew and their daughter Tina.
