
Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Carlos Torres on Unsplash
New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus completes George A. Romero's brand-new masterpiece of zombie horror, the massive novel left unfinished at Romero's death!
George A. Romero invented the modern zombie with Night of the Living Dead, creating a monster that has become a key part of pop culture. Romero often felt hemmed in by the constraints of film-making. To tell the story of the rise of the zombies and the fall of humanity the way it should be told, Romero turned to fiction. Unfortunately, when he died, the story was incomplete.
Enter Daniel Kraus, co-author, with Guillermo del Toro, of the New York Times bestseller The Shape of Water (based on the Academy Award-winning movie) and Trollhunters (which became an Emmy Award-winning series), and author of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch (an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year). A lifelong Romero fan, Kraus was honored to be asked, by Romero's widow, to complete The Living Dead.
Set in the present day, The Living Dead is an entirely new tale, the story of the zombie plague as George A. Romero wanted to tell it.
A pair of medical examiners find themselves battling a dead man who won’t stay dead.
Everywhere, people are targeted by both the living and the dead.
We think we know how this story ends.
“The Living Dead is a sprawling, timely, scary epic that honors the zombie tradition but also goes in new directions and takes risks that pay off.”―Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song
“If Night of the Living Dead was the first word in the dead rising field, The Living Dead is the last word. A monumental achievement.”―Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual
“Like a lost Romero classic, which will play out on the inside of your skull long after you've finished it.”―Clive Barker
“A work of gory genius marked by all of Romero's trademark wit, humanity, and merciless social observations. How lucky are we to have this final act of Grand Guignol from the man who made the dead walk?”―Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman
“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, author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism
"[A] phenomenally enrapturing and reverberating work of art. Vividly illuminates the minds of the characters.”―Booklist on The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus
Daniel Kraus is the author of numerous novels, including Rotters, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch duology, Bent Heavens, and the Teddies Saga. With Guillermo del Toro, he wrote the New York Times-bestselling The Shape of Water and Trollhunters (the inspiration for the Netflix series). His novels have been Odyssey Award winners, Library Guild selections, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults picks, Parent’s Choice Gold Award winners, Bram Stoker finalists, and more. He lives with his wife in Chicago.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and Directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
In Honor of the greatest auteur of our time, Judith is using one of her favorite quotes by him.
"Every day, once a day, give yourself a present"
David Lynch (January 20, 1946-January 15, 2025)
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch and the new The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. In October 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre, considered the biggest film event of Dallas in 2024 by Dallas Observer!
Judith Carter was in the Upscale and Luxury Hospitality Industry for most of her life. In 2004 she had a beautiful baby boy with Special Needs and put the pause on her career until 2017 to dedicate herself to him and then others, assisting and volunteering as a legal advocate ensuring the best medical care, evaluations and educations for Special Needs children and their families.
Matt and Judith were family friends for over 20 years. She was there with her family in support when his wife Jen passed away suddenly in 2006. Then just 6 weeks later while Matt was in Dallas; he and his Father, Dave, and Step-Mother, Genie, were there as support, when Judith was alone and her son received the first of many diagnoses that changed the trajectory of their lives. So it made sense in the turbulent year of 2020, Matt asked Judith to take over running the online store that has become MZS.press. The rest as they say is, "Their"-story.