FROM THE DESK OF DANIEL KRAUS Dear Reader, If you've read the author's note in The Living Dead , my previous collaboration with George A. Romero, you know the twists and turns that went into shaping that posthumous novel. The existence of the novel itself, however, was no surprise. It had been reported for a decade that Romero had been chipping away at it. Pay the Piper is a different story. While working on The Living Dead , I grew close to George's wife, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, and joined the board of the George A. Romero Foundation. Prior to my joining, the GARF's first major piece of news was the acquisition of George's archives by the University of Pittsburgh. Under the guidance of Horror Studies Collection Coordinator Benjamin J. Rubin, cataloging efforts began in early 2019. In August 2019, I was granted permission to be the first person outside library staff to sift through the collection. My goal was to aid in the university's efforts to publicize the collection, though I made no secret that spending a week inside George's head was a dream come true. At that point, twenty-six boxes had received preliminary cataloging but had yet to be chronologized. This made the discovery process, for me, all the more startling. In one envelope might be George's handwritten notes for an early version of Dawn of the Dead starring O. J. Simpson, and in the next might be an unproduced screenplay called Funky Coven . On the final day of my visit, inside the final box I opened--T-Box 7, SL15, to be exact--I came across two thick envelopes marked PAY THE PIPER . Inside were 348 pages of a novel. At first, I thought it might be complete. As I sat down to read, I learned that was not the case. George had clearly delighted in breaking his story ever wider, chapter by chapter, only to stop cold just when it came time to start knotting the threads. Context clues from George's manuscript suggest his draft was written in 1998, though it's possible the true date is 2004 (one year before Hurricane Katrina). It is unclear why George kept the project secret. Perhaps he feared the reaction to a work that had nothing to do with zombies (except, in brief, the Vodou kind). By this point in his career, that had become the standard reaction to Romero, and one that, I regret to say, remains in place. Strides, however, are being made. For instance, the celebrated release of George's lost 1975 film, The Amusement Park . If The Living Dead was the novel George felt he had to write, Pay the Piper was the book he wanted to write. It is filled to the brim with the sort of stuff George had adored since youth: pirates, westerns, jungle adventuring. He clearly had a ball throwing everything he loved into the pot. Leaving me, twenty-five years later, to autopsy what he'd left, study the clues, and find a method in the madness that would carry the novel to conclusion. Though George left no notes on the project, the wealth of subtextual coincidences insists he had a plan. Pay the Piper's story nods at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, which involved the infamous Pirates Lafitte. Pirates play a big role in the largely forgotten film Wake of the Red Witch , to which a whole chapter of Romero's manuscript was dedicated. Red Witch starred John Wayne, and a character in Pay the Piper is obsessed with Wayne, particularly Wayne's death, on screen and off. I later discovered that Wayne called the cancer that ultimately took his life "the Red Witch." This revelation pulled tight many of George's loose strings. Given Romero's status as the godfather of zombies, it is notable that Pay the Piper touches upon aspects of vodou/voodoo zombis. If there was any doubt about George's interest in the subject, one need only see his introduction to the 2016 edition of William Seabrook's 1929 book, The Magic Island , often credited as the text that first brought zombis to the attention of the western world. The intro must have been one of the last things George wrote before falling prey to his own "Red Witch" of lung cancer. Finishing The Living Dead was the greatest honor of my career. Stumbling across a second novel was a coda I never saw coming. My hope for this work is that it continues to broaden the popular view of George A. Romero's capabilities. He was more than zombies. He was an artist, plain and simple, and a great one at that. --Daniel Kraus Excerpted from Pay the Piper by George A. Romero, Daniel Kraus All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
