The manuscript was forgotten, unknown. But when Daniel Kraus found it in the University of Pittsburgh’s
George A. Romero Archival Collection, he realized it was something unique: an unfinished novel by the famed horror filmmaker.
“I'd never heard of
Pay the Piper. Shortly after I found it, no one had heard of it,” Kraus tells
Pittsburgh City Paper. “It was really a kind of a secret project, I think. I was really surprised that it existed at all.
Set in Louisiana,
Pay the Piper (Union Square) is a sprawling tale of intrigue and horror. Despite its more frightful elements, the book is more of a study of the human condition, with characters including nine-year-old Renée Pontiac; Pete Roosevelt, the unofficial sheriff of Alligator Point, the small town in which the book is set; and the schoolteacher Miss Ward.
Kraus says that even though he was, at the time of
Pay the Piper's discovery, still "finishing up the giant task" of completing
The Living Dead — a 656-page book he co-wrote with Romero and published in 2020, three years after the filmmaker's death — he I was "still excited about the possibility" of doing another project.
"Right away I alerted [Romero's widow] Sue to its existence because she didn't know either," he explains. "And then we started talking about whether or not we should get the band back together and finish this other book, too.”
Kraus — a best-selling author whose work includes the novels
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch and
Whalefall, and collaborations with Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro — treated the material carefully, not wanting to waste a word.
“I’m very aware that we have a finite amount of George Romero pages,” says Kraus. “I’m always very cognizant of not wanting to lose anything. So, if something doesn’t work where he put it, I try to use it elsewhere. Or maybe give some action to a different character, or combine characters. It’s definitely not as straightforward as he wrote the first half and I picked up from there.”
The story — people, mostly children, being lured to their deaths by an infamous piper — and the Louisiana setting veer from Romero's more famous works, namely the
Living Dead movies that were set and often shot in and around Pittsburgh. Kraus thinks Romero must have spent some time in Louisiana during his travels and appears to have grasped the nuances of the place.
“As grateful as he was for zombies, he definitely felt sort of hemmed in by them,” Kraus says. “That's what made this book not only exciting to me, because a lot of my favorite projects aren't his zombie films, although I love them too, but I can tell that he was excited by this. As good as his pages were in
The Living Dead, the pages that he left from
Pay the Piper were his best. He clearly was really excited about it, about not writing about zombies.”
Kraus thinks Romero was liberated in that he was free to write about
some of his favorite things, such as adventure stories, pirates, jungle misadventures, and notably, John Wayne films.
“When he was unshackled from zombies, he found that he could do what he wanted to do, apparently,” Kraus says. “And that was, pour all of the stuff he really loved into a project.”