“Well, the first story was great! It was more World War Z than Night of the Living Dead. Or, perhaps more accurately, Land of the Dead.
George Romero deserves all the credit in the world for the zombie craze. Night, Dawn, and Day are all great, all in different ways.
But then…George Romero kinda lost the thread, IMO.
A little history:
Many people will say that Night of the Living Dead is revolutionary for casting a black actor in the lead role, and for using the horror genre to say something about race in America. This is somewhat accurate, somewhat inaccurate.
The part of Ben was originally intended to be played by Rudy Ricci, however Romero auditioned Duane Jones on a recommendation, and Romero says Jones was far and away the best actor they auditioned.
However, Romero consciously resisted changing the dialog and story to be different because of the casting of Jones. That is probably fairly revolutionary for the time: casting a black man in a role originally conceived for a white man in 1968 without making any changes. This version of “colorblind” casting, though probably not in favor today, was a pretty big deal then.
In our modern lenses, Night of the Living Dead appears to be very much a story about race, especially with the ending. I think it’s mistakenly thought to be a very direct commentary on race, when in reality, it’s more a commentary on humanity, in general. Night of the Living Dead should probably be credited with the popularization of the “the real enemy…is us!” storyline. Which is great, though overused. While the overuse of the trope makes it pretty tired today, you can’t blame the OG.
Moving to Dawn of the Dead, Ken Foree, also a black man, is probably the true lead of the film, though Dawn is probably one of the movies that comes closest to having multiple leads share the screen, and it does feel very organic the way things shake out. Dawn has some very light, though a bit clumsy, things to say about consumerism. I think it still works because it’s so silly in a way. The mall music, some of the zombies, there’s a lot of silliness and over the top violence that sets this up to be goofier than Night of the Living Dead, and that leaves a little more room for messaging. Plus, the messaging is mostly speculative on the part of the characters, which makes it easier to swallow as audience, and I think the heavy-handed “this is what it means!” assertions were left to audience members and critics rather than being a bludgeon in the movie.
Day of the Dead has a female lead, ostensibly, though Joe Pilato steals the show. This one’s a little tougher, thematically. Romero intended to make the “Gone with the Wind of zombie movies,” however his budget was halved, and he had to compress a 200-page script down to a reasonable length. So it’s a little unclear how different the movie would’ve been if it turned out as Romero intended. The product we got seemed to be a return to Night of the Living Dead’s premise that we humans just can’t get along. If I’m going to over analyze, the zombies are successful because there is no in-fighting, they all get along and have a single-minded goal, where the free will of humans, and the fact that different humans want differen things, makes it challenging for humans to achieve things.
It wasn’t until 20 years later that we got Land of the Dead. Land had a decent start, but there were two things that got in the way. One was that some of the zombie beahviors were…kinda crazy. Day of the Dead was bonkers, and people trying to teach Bud the zombie to do shit fit right in. The more dour tone of Land of the Dead doesn’t work as well with a zombie who figures out A) that zombies can cross water, B) how to use a firearm, and C) in what I call the worst thing in the movie, a zombie mercy kills another zombie with a gun. So not only does the zombie learn how to use a gun, he has compassion and intelligence enough to end a zombie’s suffering. But number two is the real issue: this one really hits you over the head with Have and Have Not stuff, which isn’t totally intolerable, but with a lighter touch, the message would’ve been more effective and the movie would’ve been more fun. When you’ve got Dennis Hopper as an insane billionaire riding out the zombie apocalypse in a skyscraper, you can go WAY further and more over-the-top with his behavior, and that, for me, goes further than having him do silly things like trying to make a getaway with a bag of cash. Show him in a bathtub full of Twizzlers. Have him turn a priceless painting into a ridiculous Flava Flav necklace.
Diary of the Dead was made in a faux found footage style. I think this may have been some kind of message about the media-ization of culture or something? I don’t know. Survival of the Dead came next, and that’s mostly what there is to say about it. Diary and Survival were the two movies that made me pretty certain that Romero was out of zombie ideas.
Now, apparently there’s a Road of the Dead, unmade movie, which involves zombies doing a sort of Death Race 2000 thing. THAT I’m into. Stupid? Fuck yeah.
Which brings us to The Living Dead.
TLD is definitely a ripoff of World War Z, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. WWZ is a super good book, and super good books can hold the weight of a few ripoffs.
I have two issues with the execution:
One is that it’s a BIG book, and it takes its time getting to the zombies. Which…I don’t love.
The problem with the slow burn, as applied to zombies, is that…let’s call this book the 7th chapter in the Of The Dead series. This is the 7th time we, as audience, have seen this happen, and while I don’t mind seeing the same thing again, I think the writing should have been more thoughtful about the fact that the audience is probably numb to the creeping horror of knowing that we’re dealing with zombies while the characters fumble through those early stages. It’s almost like, in the world of the book, we’re in a parallel dimension where zombie fiction does not exist. Night of the Living Dead has its first kill inside of a few minutes. Dawn of the Dead opens on a frantic newsroom where people are deciding whether to continue bringing news or to flee because the zombie apocalypse is in full panic mode. Day of the Dead takes place after the initial panic has subsided and very few humans are left. It’s almost like Romero forgot what he’d done before, the smart move of getting us into the action and assuming that everyone was either familiar with the earlier movies or familiar enough with the concept of zombies to drop us closer to the action.
This might be an issue of personal taste: I don’t really enjoy books where I know more than the characters and have to watch them put the pieces together. For me, it’s tedious. And I recognize it for what it is: One of the oldest writing tricks in the book(s).
If you want your audience to read, one way to do that is to make them feel good. One way to make them feel good is to make them feel smart. One way to make them feel smart is to put them in the god chair, where they know what’s happening WAY before the characters. When you pick up this book, you know there are zombies, and you KNOW when a couple doctors are performing an autopsy on a guy, something bad is going to happen. No question of what’s happening or whether it’s going to happen, you know where this is all headed.
When you pick up this book, you may read about doctors and scientists, people WAY smarter than you, but you’ve still got one thing on them: You saw it coming.
For me, it’s not an effective method of engagement. And the worst part is that it’s the beginning sections, which means you’ve got the most boring, most tedious bits up front.
The other problem, which I alluded to earlier, is that the message-y parts of this book, even in what little I read, are hard and sort of all over the place. We’ve already got messages about race/culture, police, homelessness, women in the workplace, neurodiversity…and I know there’s a lot more to come.
I’ve said sort of the same thing on many reviews, but it needs repeating: I don’t take issue with the reality or depth of these problems, and I tend to agree with most authors’ takes on the problems. However, when it’s badly integrated into the story, it may have good intentions and aspirations, but it’s just not good storytelling.
The cop character is cartoonishly hateful, and he says things out loud that even a cartoonishly evil cop would only say to other cops, not to other people who happen to be around. There’s a line that goes something like, “Let this homeless bum die, his dying is clogging up traffic, which consists of taxpayers.” I get that this is how we interpret the ways some people think, but having this character say this aloud, to the person he’s speaking to, is just not writing that speaks to me.
Maybe the way I need to try talking about this sort of thing is this: Fiction has to be more realistic than real life.
The thing about non-fiction is that it’s prove-able. So, I might find dialog like the stuff spoken by the cop hard to believe, but in non-fiction, that line can be traced back to its origin. I can actually see where and how it was spoken, and the idea that it SEEMS unrelastic doesn’t matter if the thing is, in fact, real. In non-fiction, as unbelievable as something might be, all you have to do is prove that it happened.
But in fiction, everything that happens is concocted by the author, so fiction almost has a higher bar for creating realistic scenarios, characters, and statements.
In fiction, there’s really no such thing as proving it happened because NOTHING in the book actually happened. So, in fiction, you have to take it a step further and make the reader believe that what’s happening is plausible based on the situation and the characters. I have to believe the cop would act this way before he does, or I would have to be shocked and then later on get some sort of explanation or justification that makes me say, “Huh, I guess that follows.”
I’m sure some of you are reading this right now and thinking, “This guy reads Spider-Man. What the hell does he know about believability.”
Okay, let’s look at Spider-Man for a sec.
Spider-Man, and most of the 1960’s Marvel books, were created as soap operas, real stories, meant to ask the question “What would happen if REAL people got superpowers?” Spider-Man’s powers don’t exist to wow us when he lifts a car. They exist to ask the question, “What does a human being do in a position of great power?”
Time travel, magic rings, faster-than-light space travel, these are all unrealistic things, but I find them more realistic than poorly-drawn characters. For me, it’s less important if the mechanism of time travel is believable, and it’s more important that the character sitting in the time machine makes sense.
For some, I imagine that the real-life place for cops in American society right now is more than enough to find this sort of thing believable in fiction. The signifier of “cop” basically tells you everything you need to know. And that’s fine, that’s you. For me, because we’re talking about a fictional character, I feel like I need a little more. The burden of proof is paradoxically heavier in fiction. I recognize this is a strange thing to say, but hey, I’m a strange guy.
Anyway!
The early-on lack of action and seeming shotgun approach to our many social, environmental, and technological illnesses just made the book feel packed with everything I didn’t want up front. So I put it down.
It’s a little unfair, I only got through a small portion of the book because this is a HUGE book. Many reviews describe it as sprawling, which is a euphemistic term for “way too fucking long.”
What little I read makes me think the book is longer than it needs to be, and where it’s longer is probably on the sort of stuff that I’m not interested in.
Maybe someone will forget to copyright this book, like what happened with Night of the Living Dead, and someone can trim it way down to an edit that’s more focused.
In fact, I think this would be a great test: Cut this into two books. In book A, include all the messaging and character stuff, and reduce the zombie stuff. In book B, include all the zombie stuff and action, reduce drastically the messaging and character stuff. See which one people prefer.
I’m not TOTALLY certain I won’t give this one another shot. I think I could be persuaded to skip ahead and bit and pick it up where the action is in full swing. But 656 pages is just a big life commitment, and in the time it takes me to read, I could watch the original Of The Dead trilogy, probably twice. Sounds more fun. “