New supernatural horror novel Pay the Piper, set in a cursed Louisiana bayou, is heading our way later this year, and it hails from the minds of legendary director George A. Romero and bestselling author Daniel Kraus.
With 2020’s The Living Dead, New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus took on the Herculean task of bringing George A. Romero’s unfinished zombie novel to completion. Now, Kraus embarks on a final collaboration with Pay the Piper, in which the author worked closely with Romero’s estate to bring the horror master’s unfinished novel to light.
While sifting through University of Pittsburgh Library’s System’s George A. Romero Archival Collection in 2020, Daniel Kraus turned up a surprise: a half-finished novel called Pay the Piper, a project few had ever heard of. It marked the beginning of the author’s second and final collaboration with Romero’s work.
Pay the Piper publishes on September 3, 2024, with preorders live now.
About Pay the Piper: “Alligator Point, Louisiana, population 141: Young Renée Pontiac has heard stories of “the Piper”—a murderous swamp entity haunting the bayou—her entire life. But now the legend feels horrifically real: children are being taken and gruesomely slain. To resist, Pontiac and the town’s desperate denizens will need to acknowledge the sins of their ancestors—the infamous slave traders, the Pirates Lafitte. If they don’t . . . it’s time to pay the piper.”
Kraus said in a statement, “It has been the highest honor of my life to shepherd Romero’s incomplete novels to a finished state. Romero’s work helped raise me since the age of five and I see this as going a small way toward repaying that favor. I’m especially excited about Pay the Piper because it expands our understanding of what interested Romero and what he was capable of. It’s most assuredly a horror novel but it has nothing to do with zombies! He loved zombies, of course, but they also boxed him in.
“Pay the Piper, which includes some of the finest writing of his career, gave him a blank canvas on which he could paint a character-focused, atmosphere-drenched, utterly surprising tale of terror. My job was to pick up his brush and fill in the missing pieces. Maybe put a nice frame around it too.”
Previously, Kraus wrote The Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro (based on the same idea Kraus and del Toro created for the Oscar-winning film) and Trollhunters (adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series). Kraus followed his science thriller Wrath, co-authored with Shäron Moalem, with the widely acclaimed USA Today bestseller Whalefall, with a feature adaptation currently in development.
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