Pay the Piper: A Novel

by George Romero, Daniel Kraus

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Missing children. A town on edge. Whispers of an elusive boogeyman. Daniel Kraus (The Living Dead) brings a horror icon's unreleased project into the spotlight.

A terrifying tale of supernatural horror set in a cursed Louisiana bayou, from the minds of legendary director George Romero and bestselling author Daniel Kraus.

In 2019, while sifting through University of Pittsburgh Library System’s George A. Romero Archival Collection, novelist Daniel Kraus turned up a surprise: a half-finished novel called Pay the Piper, a project few had ever heard of. In the years since, Kraus has worked with Romero’s estate to bring this unfinished masterwork to light.

Alligator Point, Louisiana, population 141: Young Renée Pontiac has heard stories of “the Piper”—a murderous swamp entity haunting the bayou—her entire life. But now the legend feels horrifically real: children are being taken and gruesomely slain. To resist, Pontiac and the town’s desperate denizens will need to acknowledge the sins of their ancestors—the infamous slave traders, the Pirates Lafitte. If they don’t . . . it’s time to pay the piper.

Perfect for fans of George A. Romero’s pioneering horror movies or his previous collaboration with Daniel Kraus, The Living Dead, Pay the Piper is a thrilling taleof dark folklore, grisly murders, and the horrors that manifest when a community must confront its shadowy past. Readers looking for gothic horror books will enjoy the chilling supernatural elements and haunting Southern setting, and anyone who enjoys scary books for adults will appreciatethe chance to dive into this lost work by a celebrated horror icon

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781454950899
Publisher:	Union Square & Co.
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

George A. Romero is often considered the greatest horror director of all time. His classic “Dead” movie cycle began with the groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, which were followed by four sequels. He also directed Creepshow, The Dark Half, and The Crazies, and created the TV series Tales from the Darkside. Romero died in 2017 after a fifty-year career in film.

Daniel Kraus is a New York Times bestseller. With Guillermo del Toro, he wrote The Shape of Water (based on the same idea Kraus and del Toro created for the Oscar-winning film) and Trollhunters (adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series). Kraus followed his sci-fi thriller Wrath, co-authored with Shäron Moalem, with the widely acclaimed USA Today bestseller Whalefall. His novel The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top Ten Books of the Year. He lives in Illinois.

Read an Excerpt

FROM THE DESK OF DANIEL KRAUS

Dear Reader,

If you’ve read the author’s note in The Living Dead, my previous collaboration with George A. Romero, you know the twists and turns that went into shaping that posthumous novel. The existence of the novel itself, however, was no surprise. It had been reported for a decade that Romero had been chipping away at it.

Pay the Piper is a different story. While working on The Living Dead, I grew close to George’s wife, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, and joined the board of the George A. Romero Foundation. Prior to my joining, the GARF’s first major piece of news was the acquisition of George’s archives by the University of Pittsburgh. Under the guidance of Horror Studies Collection Coordinator Benjamin J. Rubin, cataloging efforts began in early 2019. In August 2019, I was granted permission to be the first person outside library staff to sift through the collection. My goal was to aid in the university’s efforts to publicize the collection, though I made no secret that spending a week inside George’s head was a dream come true.

At that point, twenty-six boxes had received preliminary cataloging but had yet to be chronologized. This made the discovery process, for me, all the more startling. In one envelope might be George’s handwritten notes for an early version of Dawn of the Dead starring O. J. Simpson, and in the next might be an unproduced screenplay called Funky Coven.

On the final day of my visit, inside the final box I opened—T-Box 7, SL15, to be exact—I came across two thick envelopes marked PAY THE PIPER. Inside were 348 pages of a novel. At first, I thought it might be complete. As I sat down to read, I learned that was not the case. George had clearly delighted in breaking his story ever wider, chapter by chapter, only to stop cold just when it came time to start knotting the threads.

Context clues from George’s manuscript suggest his draft was written in 1998, though it’s possible the true date is 2004 (one year before Hurricane Katrina). It is unclear why George kept the project secret. Perhaps he feared the reaction to a work that had nothing to do with zombies (except, in brief, the Vodou kind). By this point in his career, that had become the standard reaction to Romero, and one that, I regret to say, remains in place. Strides, however, are being made. For instance, the celebrated release of George’s lost 1975 film, The Amusement Park.

If The Living Dead was the novel George felt he had to write, Pay the Piper was the book he wanted to write. It is filled to the brim with the sort of stuff George had adored since youth: pirates, westerns, jungle adventuring. He clearly had a ball throwing everything he loved into the pot. Leaving me, twenty-five years later, to autopsy what he’d left, study the clues, and find a method in the madness that would carry the novel to conclusion.

Though George left no notes on the project, the wealth of subtextual coincidences insists he had a plan. Pay the Piper’s story nods at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, which involved the infamous Pirates Lafitte. Pirates play a big role in the largely forgotten film Wake of the Red Witch, to which a whole chapter of Romero’s manuscript was dedicated. Red Witch starred John Wayne, and a character in Pay the Piper is obsessed with Wayne, particularly Wayne’s death, on screen and off. I later discovered that Wayne called the cancer that ultimately took his life “the Red Witch.” This revelation pulled tight many of George’s loose strings.

Given Romero’s status as the godfather of zombies, it is notable that Pay the Piper touches upon aspects of vodou/voodoo zombis. If there was any doubt about George’s interest in the subject, one need only see his introduction to the 2016 edition of William Seabrook’s 1929 book, The

Magic Island, often credited as the text that first brought zombis to the attention of the western world. The intro must have been one of the last things George wrote before falling prey to his own “Red Witch” of lung cancer.

Finishing The Living Dead was the greatest honor of my career. Stumbling across a second novel was a coda I never saw coming. My hope for this work is that it continues to broaden the popular view of George A. Romero’s capabilities. He was more than zombies. He was an artist, plain and simple, and a great one at that.

—Daniel Kraus

Editorial Reviews

06/03/2024

Kraus’s second attempt at completing an unfinished novel from horror master Romero (1940–2017), after The Living Dead, is a dud; the plot, about a boogeyman targeting children in the Louisiana bayou, is familiar, and lackluster prose and thin characterizations do little to elevate it. The backwoods town of Alligator Point is home to the legend of the Piper, “the thing kids whispered about, the thing that drank laughter like Kool-Aid, that chewed good feelings like bubblegum.” The Piper strikes early in the narrative, abducting nine-year-old Billy May as punishment for the sins of his ancestors, then removing his heart and devouring it. Billy’s fate remains unknown for months, but after more kids disappear, panic sets in, and his best friend endeavors to learn the truth. Kraus’s rendering of the Cajun dialect often sounds like a parody (“Dat somet’ing out t’ere, it de root of all de awful on de Point”), and the plot’s late-breaking Lovecraftian elements feel tacked on and can’t save the cookie-cutter story line. Even diehard Romero fans will be disappointed. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR PAY THE PIPER

​“A captivating triumph for horror fans.”
―Tananarive Due, author of The Reformatory

“A great action-packed horror novel . . . for fans of waterlogged southern gothic with monsters that prey off the complicated history of a land and its people.”
―Booklist

"Not only is this deliciously gruesome book teeming with classic Southern gothic trappings, it also resonates with a socially conscious message. . . . For fans of both Kraus’s novels and Romero’s films, this bloody Southern story highlights the strengths of both auteurs."
―Library Journal

"Pay the Piper features many of Romero’s creative hallmarks—creepy creatures, icky deaths, and under-the-surface social commentary . . . The novel demonstrates a knack for the kind of patient, expansive storytelling Romero couldn’t always squeeze into his big-screen efforts. . . . To those who celebrated (or perhaps derided) Romero as the dean of the dead, the completed novel offers a chance to reconsider his legacy."
―New York Times

"Romero and Kraus start with a fun monster-fighting book set in the swamp. While they have us looking over our shoulders, they end with us looking within. . . . Accountability, with destruction as the consequence should we not fulfill it, is the cautionary tale with the possibility of a hopeful resolution we crave."
―Southern Review of Books


PRAISE FOR THE LIVING DEAD

“A horror landmark and a work of gory genius.”
—Joe Hill

“Will play out on the inside of your skull long after you’ve finished it.”
―Clive Barker

“Panoramic and sweeping, a smorgasbord of the undead, a book that will give even the most ardent zombie lovers their fix.”
—New York Times

“A damn fun southern-fried yarn. . . it’s gross, clever and a compelling peek into a community that feels left behind in time.”
—Variety

“The definitive account of the zombie apocalypse. It expands, clarifies, and concludes a tale more than 50 years in the telling, and does so with wit, style, and a deep sense of commitment.”
—Washington Post

“A zombie tale for the ages. This is a rare gem of a story, one that pays homage to its varied source material, while also standing on its own merits. A true gift to horror fans.”
—Library Journal (starred, a Top 10 Horror Novel of 2020)

“Every zombie movie lives in the shadow of Romero, but he never got the budget to work at the scale he deserved. Fortunately, Daniel Kraus delivers the epic book of the dead that Romero began. That shadow just got a whole lot bigger.”
—Grady Hendrix, bestselling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

“Rejoice Romero fans! The Living Dead is a sprawling, timely, scary epic that honors the zombie tradition but also takes risks that pay off.”
—Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of A Head Full of Ghosts

 

From the Publisher

07/01/2024

A modern horror author teams up with a horror-cinema legend to create a modern monstrous spin on Southern gothic fiction. Kraus (Whalefall) found this half-finished novel among the personal effects of the late horror director Romero, who died in 2017. Working with Romero's estate, Kraus has finished this story about the denizens of swampy Alligator's Point, LA. Many in the Point lead hardscrabble lives, and several who are desperate for something different are also selling their property to oil companies to drill. As the residents of the Point try to escape the pull of the swamp, the Piper, a creature seemingly straight out of fairy tales who has sworn vengeance on the town, is luring local children away to be brutally killed. Many in the Point know of this terror, but soon their ancestors' sins will have them all paying the Piper. Those horror fans expecting classically Romero zombie hijinks from this novel might be disappointed, but there's plenty of gory description to satisfy them. Not only is this deliciously gruesome book teeming with classic Southern gothic trappings, it also resonates with a socially conscious message. VERDICT For fans of both Kraus's novels and Romero's films, this bloody Southern story highlights the strengths of both auteurs.—James Gardner

Library Journal