Death is for the Living

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The Living Dead is a zombie novel written by famed zombie filmmaker George Romero.

After Romero’s death, his widow asked author Daniel Kraus to complete the manuscript. The resulting 600+ page novel is not just epically long but possibly also the last zombie book you’ll ever need to read.

Just kidding. But this is a good one.

“In the chest
in the heart
was the vessel
was the pulse
was the art
was the love
was the clot
small and slow
and the scar
that could not know
the rest of you
was very nearly perfect.”

First of all, if you’re going to commit to almost 650 pages, know that the loose ends are tied up at the end. Any zombie book is about living, in essence, and this one is no exception. The above quote is read to one character by a loved one as he lays dying. It wasn’t the saddest goodbye but it was heartbreaking nonetheless.

What would you do during the zombie apocalypse? How would you survive? TLD gives you many options. With several different narrators including a zombie, this is definitely a book that takes a long time to really get into but by the end I had a bit of a book hangover.

My favorite character was not Charlie, the badass leader of the resistance (along with others) but rather Greer. She buried her love under rough edges but she felt it deep. Her storyline with Muse felt the most applicable to the world today. I don’t want to give away the plot so I’ll say her grief at her partner’s lack of scientifically valid opinions felt very of-the-moment.

The last fifty pages or so of this novel were totally unexpected and very emotional. When you lose someone you love, you enter into this netherworld where all of your memories of the person feel like dreams. You question who you are without them. The world feels so cold. In a zombie book, you know you’ll have a higher than average body count by the final page. What this book did well (though really, it was so long, it really had a lot of space to do it) was to make the reader emotionally involved with the characters. You loved with them and you lost with them. It made the deaths, when they came, relatable.

One last note: I really liked the autistic character and how she compiled all the stories. It’s well known that autistic people can be better equipped to find patterns in “data” that others miss. I loved her conversion from government stats nerd to librarian. It was fantastic that she was able to make sense of the information coming in, organize it, and interview so many people.