“The Living Dead”, by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus: the dead still walk the Earth
Review by Patrick Bateman
George A. Romero certainly needs no introduction: director of some of the most important horror films in the history of cinema, putative father of the zombie saga that began in 1968 with "The night of the living dead" and ended in 2009 with "Survival of the Dead ” and a source of inspiration for many literary, film and television eponyms. For several years, the American filmmaker has dreamed of trying his hand at a novel, a work without constraints outside the imagination itself, which is able to put pen to paper his apocalyptic obsessions of a world where the dead begin to walk on Land. However, in 2017, with still unfinished work, an aggressive lung cancer leads to the death (the real one, without return) this multifaceted artist. It will take the commitment of one of his exceptional fans, the writer Daniel Kraus, already at work with the award-winning director Guillermo Del Toro in "Trollhunters" and "The Shape of Water" , to withdraw from the grave, it is the case to say it, Romero's disturbing visions. The result was "The Living Dead" ( La Nave di Teseo , 2020), a weighty volume of almost seven hundred pages, a book that, as in the best Romerian tradition, is not only terrifying in the raw and violent exposition of guts and impairments, but it is in its refined filigree, a ferocious social criticism that targets a divided and divisive country like the United States and man's ancestral and unmotivated contempt for nature.
Using the imagination, totally free from budget limits, the two writers analyze this pandemic made up of emaciated and apparently indestructible bodies that move, devouring and infecting anyone who gets in their way, using different points of view and changing the chapter perspective. after chapter.
In the course of the narration, the deeds of a coroner and his assistant are followed; the reports of a woman barricaded in the US census office, the vicissitudes of a television anchorman; the escape of a young woman from the multi-ethnic and poor suburbs on the fringes of the great industrialized city; the handling of the crisis and panic on an aircraft carrier by its commander and the conquest of the useless and superfluous by a frustrated businessman with an incendiary tongue. These and other characters, who will follow a complex interweaving of events until they all find themselves more or less beyond the Canadian border, in a primitive and utopian society without masters or weapons, are the protagonists of a choral novel where survival instinct, inner demons, loss and sacrifices dominate leaving the reader suspended in a limbo between tension and bitterness. The living dead gain little by little, forcing the living to hide, to fight, to deal with deprivation and with the return to a natural state to which they have never been accustomed.
The revolt of the dead – protagonists of a restyling operation and made even more difficult to eliminate – a beginning in medias res never fully explained in the course of the book that certainly has an allegorical meaning: the zombies (not only humans, but also animals of all kinds) seen as golems (the shapeless clay giant of Jewish mythology) that punish a greedy and disrespectful humanity, unable to live together in the same habitat as other life forms. This is the last message sent by Romero before moving on, a simple and ecumenical message, at the same time a firm invitation and a harsh warning.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/recensioni/i-morti-viventi-di-george-a-romero-e-daniel-kraus-i-morti-camminano-ancora-sulla-terra/ on Sat, 07 Nov 2020 03:34:00 +0000.