Arts & Entertainment
George Romero and a Swamp Monster: Evanston Writer Completes Novel by the Reluctant Master of Horror
Left: George A. Romero, 2009. (Wiki Commons) Center: “Pay the Piper” book cover. (Cover art by Patrick Sullivan and Igor Satanovsky. Cover images by Evangeline Gallagher; MaxyM/Shutterstock.com (texture). Published by Union Square & Co.) Right: Daniel Kraus (Suzanne Plunkett)
Visionary filmmaker George A. Romero started the zombie apocalypse genre in 1968 when “Night of the Living Dead” rewrote the rules for horror movies.
Romero films featured social commentary, strong minority characters and a cargo of carnage. Later works include “Creepshow,” “Dawn of the Dead” and the TV series “Tales from the Darkside.”
PBS fans might be interested to know that among Romero’s first jobs was making short films for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
Romero died in 2017 at the age of 77, yet he is co-author of a new novel, “Pay the Piper.” The creator of the Living Dead is dead, but his legacy is alive and hungry.
Daniel Kraus is a former Chicago librarian who completed the novel that Romero wrote but didn’t finish. The Evanston resident is a lifelong fan who discovered the manuscript in 2019 when he got an early look at Romero’s archives.
He had already worked with Romero posthumously — Kraus finished writing the well-regarded epic novel “The Living Dead” (2020) that Romero had started — and he is now on the board of the George A. Romero Foundation and friends with Romero’s widow, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero.
Kraus also collaborated with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro on the novelization of “The Shape of Water,” and he writes his own thrillers, including his most recent, “Whalefall” (2023).
When the University of Pittsburgh acquired Romero’s archive for its Horror Studies Collection, Kraus was the first person outside of the library to dig through the 26 boxes of archival material.
He found a 300+ page novel called “Pay the Piper” without an ending. No one seems to have known Romero was working on it or why he abruptly stopped.
The newly released “Pay the Piper” is fraught with frights but not the dead-who-eat-the-living variety. It’s a well-told tale about an ominous creature killing the residents of a dying community in the Louisiana bayou.
WTTW News spoke with Kraus about the legacy of the living dead, swamp monsters and the time he met Romero.
WTTW News: Tell us about ‘Pay the Piper’ — and no spoilers, please — I’m halfway through and enjoying it very much.
Daniel Kraus: It’s about a tiny flyspeck town in the Louisiana bayou that has existed for a long time with a legend of a swamp creature called the Piper. It’s been killing people for centuries, but now it’s ratcheted up and the Piper seems to be killing children. An oddball band of local folk get together to try to figure out what’s going on.
I’m getting a Stephen King’s ‘It’ vibe from the book. Also ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ by Ray Bradbury and — even though the main character is a gutsy little girl — ‘No Country for Old Men.’
Kraus: I did an event at the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis, and someone asked about that, and it reminded me that one of the very first things I thought of when I saw the manuscript was Ray Bradbury’s work. And ‘No Country for Old Men,’ I get that — some of the characters are embittered and past their prime. A lot of the book is about looking back at local history and real history versus fake history.
And no zombies.
Kraus: No zombies. I’m speculating that that’s what was so exciting to this book for Romero, because he felt really hemmed in by zombies. His dream projects had nothing to do with zombies and really nothing to do with horror. All of his eccentric enthusiasms [pirates, American history, John Wayne movies] are in this book. His excitement for the project really leapt off the page.
Roughly what percentage of the book is you, and how much is him?
Kraus: It’s about 50/50 really. He wrote about half the book and then just stopped pretty much mid-paragraph, and we’ll never know why. Probably he got busy on something or funding came through for something. For whatever reason he never went back to it. Now, it’s not like I picked up writing where he left off. Some of the stuff he wrote has been moved around a little bit. On some occasions I combined characters. I always tried to keep as much of his prose as possible, since there’s a limited amount of it. I do what I need to to keep his voice in there.
And it was already typed out, and he left no notes or outline.
Kraus: He left no notes, and so that meant I really had to analyze what he had written for clues. I had to study these peculiar things that were in the book, so all these passages about the Pirates Lafitte and the stuff about John Wayne, these were things that stuck out, and they led me down research paths that often paid dividends, and I’d find big clues to where he was headed.
Daniel Kraus and George A. Romero in 2007. (Chris Roe)
You’re a former librarian. What was it like looking through his archives?
Kraus: His archives are filled with hundreds of scripts and treatments, and as often is the case in motion pictures, you’re writing to get the approval of a bunch of people that need to supply the money and the resources. With this book it seems he was out to satisfy no one but himself, and to me it feels like he was achieving that.
And you had already had a posthumous collaboration with him, ‘The Living Dead’ from 2020.
Kraus: There was less pressure this time because I’d done it before, but all that did was give me a false sense of confidence. ‘The Living Dead’ was such an epic novel [656 pages]. This one was a more normal-sized book, and it turned out to be harder. I maintain a healthy respect for Romero. He was my favorite artist in any medium since I was a kid. I have just the utmost love for the guy, so my work was always going to be taking into heavy account the work he’d done. To the best of our knowledge — us being me and the Romero estate — the project would’ve been something that he would have appreciated and approved of.
You met him when you were younger. Tell us about that.
Kraus: I only met him and hung out with him one time, and he was a little under the weather. He was in town for a convention, and he was very generous. One thing about once you’ve been incorporated into the Romero world, you’re hard-pressed to find anyone who has anything negative to say about him. He was truly a wonderful guy, a very proud artist. He’d be the first to say that he made some bad business decisions, but he was also proud that he never sold out and he only worked on projects that he believed in, so I try to follow that example.
What scares you?
Kraus: Lots of things scare me — war, certain political movements scare the crap out of me. The scariest thing of all is the human body and all the things that can go wrong with it. Particularly as you’re getting older and you start seeing people you know go down. It feels like a giant roulette wheel. Lots of things scare me, but horror movies and novels don’t scare me. I haven’t been scared by a piece of media in years. That’s not to say that I don’t like horror. I get other things from it.
What’s next for you?
Kraus: Coming out in July 2025, I’ve got a book I’m super excited about called ‘Angel Down’ that’s about a group of soldiers in World War I who come across an angel that has been shot out of the sky by artillery. This angel has the power to potentially end the war, but the men start fighting about what they should do with the angel, and it threatens to tear the whole endeavor apart.
Were you that kid in school who was obsessed with all things horror?
Kraus: Yes, I was from a young age. The first things I became a fan of was ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘The Twilight Zone’ and Hitchcock when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I was always into horror stuff and writing. It was a path I set on early.
And now that path includes revising or deepening our knowledge of George Romero.
Kraus: That would be one of my foremost goals.
Read an excerpt from the book below.
Cover art by Patrick Sullivan and Igor Satanovsky. Cover images by Evangeline Gallagher; MaxyM/Shutterstock.com (texture). Published by Union Square & Co.
~ 1 ~
Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel Carnival had rolled its calliope pennants to the outskirts of Alligator Point’s green inferno every January 8 since—well, no still-living Pointer could recall it not com- ing. The carny’s clockwork arrival honored an event even kids as small as Pontiac knew. Each year since starting school, she’d heard the same tale from her teacher, Miss Ward.
Under the cold, slithering daybreak fog of January 8, 1815— Miss Ward favored a flowery windup—fifteen thousand musket- wielding British soldiers stormed the only defense shielding New Orleans: an eight-hundred-yard mud barricade. We Yanks had one- third the manpower, a hastily sewn blanket of army regulars, free Blacks, frontier riflemen, Choctaw Indians, and swashbucklers under the Jolly Roger of the Pirates Lafitte. Yet the ragtag throng fell into mystical lockstep under Major General Andrew Jackson, who, in these parts, ran second in celebrity only to Jesus. Two hours later, the Brits paddled home, tails twixt legs. Their dead got pitched down a hole in the Chalmette Plantation battlefield, the only gaffe Jackson made. This was bayou country. The steamy soil said hell no to John Bulls, even dead ones, and pushed those rotting redcoats back into the sweltering sun.
According to Miss Ward, the Battle of New Orleans had been a national holiday, called simply “the Eighth,” for fifty fuck-damn years! (Miss Ward didn’t say fuck-damn, but Pontiac did, quiet, so only Billy May heard.) Somewhere, somehow, January 8 lost its prestige, but that didn’t surprise Pontiac. Things had a way of getting lost down here in the swamp. Louisianans, though, kept the date; folk down here loved their celebrations. Every backwater holler Pontiac tread, she heard the spongy land breathe life back into the vaunted dead.
Jackson: the susurration of sugarcane.
Lafitte: the algae hiss as gators skimmed.
No one held faster to January 8 than Bob Fireman, a fellow who didn’t exist but whose name gamboled across every food stand, sandwich board, and you- must-be-this-tall placard in the carnival. Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel Carnival wouldn’t arrive in Alligator Point proper until June 23—a different Louisiana holiday called St. John’s Day. The January 8 carny was a forty-minute walk north in the dry-land town of Dawes, which had itself a Piggly Wiggly, a Greyhound station, and lots of other modern conveniences.
That’s where Pontiac was headed, her nine-year-old, four-foot, fifty-five-pound body as agitated as a shaken soda can.
Daddy wouldn’t approve of her speed. “Run too fast at night, cher, and you be sayin bonsoir to the bottom of de quick,” he often warned in his baritone Cajun. That was the sober version. Half a bottle of Everclear into a blitz, his advice got less folksy: “Quicksand, fool!”
Tonight she had no intention of slowing. Besides, quicksand couldn’t snag her so long as she kept to the road. More likely she’d fall into one of the holes Daddy dug himself: Barataria Bay was pit- ted with his telltale pits, those fruitless attempts at finding the pirate booty Jean Lafitte supposedly hid almost two hundred years ago.
That’s why she’d swung by Doc’s Mercantile beforehand. She’d been saving for the Whiz-Bang fishing rod in the window but had no choice but to blow all she had on a $4.99 flashlight. How else to avoid all ten million of Daddy’s embarrassing holes? Up ahead she could see plenty of other Pointers on their way to Dawes. Like will- o’-the- wisps, their flashlights bobbed.
The fingers of Pontiac’s opposite hand sunk into the humid cover of a book Mr. Peff the librarian joshed was more’n half her size: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales by H. P. Lovecraft.
Like most of the older books in the one-room library, some- body a long while back had carved an octopus symbol into it, this time inside the back cover. Old octopus symbols were all over Alligator Point. On mossed swamp rocks, old tree trunks, the sides of ancient shanties. Pontiac didn’t know why. When she asked Daddy, she didn’t get but an irritated shrug.
Daddy didn’t like not knowing stuff. Pontiac didn’t either.
That’s why she read all the fuck-damn time, to the exasperation of Billy May and the sullenness of Daddy, who glared at her books like they were better men, none of whom needed hooch before facing the day. Mr. Lovecraft, her current choice, designed sentences as serpentine as anything in the swamp. They had rippling scales, dripping fangs.
It lumbered slobberingly into sight, he wrote.
Armed with a book like this, nothing at Bob Fireman’s could spook Pontiac.
This 618-page tome was the only protection she had since her best friend, Billy May, had claimed he was too tired to come to the carny, when the truth was he was too chicken. Pontiac was ripsnorting mad. She and Billy May always went to Bob Fireman’s, on January 8 and June 23 both. Billy always said he could hear the carny’s trucks rumbling all the way from New Orleans.
A fib, naturally. But fibs aren’t quite lies. Fibs are truths stretched taffy-thin to make life more interesting. Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel Carnival was a cathedral built to the glory of fibbing. You couldn’t turn your head without bonking into the best fibs you ever saw.
THE WORLD’S SCARIEST RIDE—she doubted that!
$5 TO SEE INDIA’S BIGGEST RAT—try again, suckers!
YOU CAN’T ESCAPE THE MUTANT MAZE—you wanna bet?
That was the trickiest, stickiest part of fibs. Spit them often enough and they piled thick and crusted hard like wasp nests. Daddy said New Orleans was built on “fibs, lies, and fabrications,” the three pillars keeping the city from going glug-glugglug into the quag. Down here your lungs breathed fibs right along with Bradford pear, Confederate jasmine, Creole mirepoix, and fresh beignets—and the bad stuff too, the flood mold, hot-trash crawfish shells, tourist-buggy horse shit, and Bourbon Street’s hobo funk of liquor, piss, and puke. What didn’t end up in a New Orleanian’s blood ended up filling every pothole in the Quarter—a bubbly black tarn of viscid vice.
Some Pointers called it “nasty-sugar.” It’d get you flying high, yes’m, but it’d gobble your insides too, sure as four dogs have four assholes.
Pontiac splashed through a moat of water spangles and ducked under a spruce-pine bend, and suddenly there was Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel. Carousel lights flashed like wet teeth and greasy treats exhaled like hot breath.
Right inside, waiting for her—and her alone—was the Chamber of Dragons. Pontiac’s pores oozed cane sugar. It hurt. She ran her fingertips over the octopus carving in her book and thought about turning tail like Billy May, heading back home.
If things did lumber at Bob Fireman’s, if things did slobber, it was inside the Chamber.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from PAY THE PIPER by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus © 2024.
Marc Vitali is the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent.
