A buried manuscript from the Night Of The Living Dead director was brought back to life
Pay the Piper, an unfinished manuscript by George A. Romero, was completed by author Daniel Kraus
Image: Gregg DeGuire/WireImage; Daniel Kraus
Just like the generations of zombies he helped inspire, the most recent novel from late horror legend George A. Romero was once buried but has been reborn. Romero, who died in 2017, wrote and directed the Night Of The Living Dead series, which also included films such as Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead, and Survival Of The Dead.
According to a new interview with The New York Times, Ben Rubin, who oversees the Horror Studies Collection at the University of Pittsburgh (side note: sick job), found Romero’s unfinished manuscript in an unassuming container when the horror pioneer’s papers were donated to the library. As it stood, the piece, titled Pay The Piper, was a 348-page, undated printout containing very few explanatory notes and no sense of an ending. (Based on the type of paper Pay The Piper was printed on, Rubin estimates it was written somewhere in the late ’90s or early 2000s.) “It was hard to read that much, and not get a payoff,” Rubin said. The writer-director had also kept the manuscript completely hidden. The horror archivist had never heard of it, nor had Romero’s widow, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero. Still, Romero clearly cared about the sprawling story, which follows “a young girl as she fights a monster haunting her impoverished Louisiana hometown,” according to NYT.