“NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD” DIRECTOR GEORGE A. ROMERO TO POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISH NEW HORROR NOVEL (EXCLUSIVE)

Bestselling author Daniel Kraus completed the manuscript in partnership with the Romero estate

Horror director George A. Romero has a new, posthumous novel, Pay the Piper, set to publish next year
The manuscript was discovered by Whalefall author Daniel Kraus, who also co-wrote the director's final book, The Living Dead, in 2020
The novel follows a small Louisiana town and the murderous entity that lives in its bayou

When legendary horror director George A. Romero died in 2017, fans thought that his work was done. Now, a new, posthumous book of his has come out of the shadows.

PEOPLE can exclusively share that Romero, known for classic horror films like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, will posthumously publish a new novel next year. Pay the Piper, written with bestselling author Daniel Kraus, is forthcoming from Union Square and Co. this fall.

The novel is not the first creative partnership between Kraus and Romero. Kraus, author of the novel Whalefall, was previously tapped to finish the 2020 novel The Living Dead, which Romero was working on before he died in 2017. The book was thought to be the director’s final project, until Kraus came across another manuscript of Romero’s while looking through an archival collection at the University of Pittsburgh library.

The author worked with the Romero estate to bring the Pay the Piper manuscript to readers, per a statement shared with PEOPLE.Pay the Piper follows Renée Pontiac, who has long heard stories about the murderous swamp entity in her Louisiana town known only as “the Piper.” The gruesome legends she's grown up with become all too real when the town's children start getting taken and killed. The murders lead Renée and other residents of Alligator Point to acknowledge their ancestors: a group of slave traders called the Pirates Lafitte.

The novel is “a terrifying tale of supernatural horror,” per the book’s description.Pay the Piper will hit shelves on Sept. 3 — read an exclusive excerpt of the book below.

Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel Carnival had rolled its calliope pennants to the outskirts of Alligator Point’s green inferno every January 8 since—well, no still-living Pointer could recall it not coming. The carny’s clockwork arrival honored an event even kids as small as Pontiac knew. Each year since starting school, she’d heard the same tale from her teacher, Miss Ward.

Under the cold, slithering daybreak fog of January 8, 1815—Miss Ward favored a flowery windup—15,000 musket-wielding British soldiers stormed the only defense shielding New Orleans: an 800-yard mud barricade. We Yanks had one-third the manpower, a hastily sewn blanket of army regulars, free Blacks, frontier riflemen, Choctaw Indians, and swashbucklers under the Jolly Roger of the Pirates Lafitte. Yet the ragtag throng fell into mystical lockstep under Major General Andrew Jackson, who, in these parts, ran second in celebrity only to Jesus. Two hours later, the Brits paddled home, tails twixt legs. Their dead got pitched down a hole in the Chalmette Plantation battlefield, the only gaffe Jackson made. This was bayou country. The steamy soil said hell no to John Bulls, even dead ones, and pushed those rotting redcoats back into the sweltering sun.

According to Miss Ward, the Battle of New Orleans had been a national holiday, called simply “the Eighth,” for 50 f—-damn years! (Miss Ward didn’t say f—-damn, but Pontiac did, quiet, so only Billy May heard.) Somewhere, somehow, January 8 lost its prestige, but that didn’t surprise Pontiac. Things had a way of getting lost down here in the swamp. Louisianans, though, kept the date; folk down here loved their celebrations. Every backwater holler Pontiac tread, she heard the spongy land breathe life back into the vaunted dead. Jackson: the susurration of sugarcane.Lafitte: the algae hiss as gators skimmed.

No one held faster to January 8 than Bob Fireman, a fellow who didn’t exist but whose name gamboled across every food stand, sandwich board, and you-must-be-this-tall placard in the carnival. Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel Carnival wouldn’t arrive in Alligator Point proper until June 23—a different Louisiana holiday called St. John’s Day. The January 8 carny was a 40-minute walk north in the dry-land town of Dawes, which had itself a Piggly Wiggly, a Greyhound station, and lots of other modern conveniences.

That’s where Pontiac was headed, her 9-year-old, 4-foot, 55-pound body as agitated as a shaken soda can.

Daddy wouldn’t approve of her speed. “Run too fast at night, cher, and you be sayin bonsoir to the bottom of de quick,” he often warned in his baritone Cajun. That was the sober version. Half a bottle of Everclear into a blitz, his advice got less folksy: “Quicksand, fool!

”

Tonight she had no intention of slowing. Besides, quicksand couldn’t snag her so long as she kept to the road. More likely she’d fall into one of the holes Daddy dug himself: Barataria Bay was pitted with his telltale pits, those fruitless attempts at finding the pirate booty Jean Lafitte supposedly hid almost 200 years ago.

That’s why she’d swung by Doc’s Mercantile beforehand. She’d been saving for the Whiz-Bang fishing rod in the window but had no choice but to blow all she had on a $4.99 flashlight. How else to avoid all 10 million of Daddy’s embarrassing holes? Up ahead she could see plenty of other Pointers on their way to Dawes. Like will-o’-the-wisps, their flashlights bobbed.

The fingers of Pontiac’s opposite hand sunk into the humid cover of a book Mr. Peff the librarian joshed was more’n half her size:

The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales
by H. P. Lovecraft.
Like most of the older books in the one-room library, somebody a long while back had carved an octopus symbol into it, this time inside the back cover. Old octopus symbols were all over Alligator Point. On mossed swamp rocks, old tree trunks, the sides of ancient shanties. Pontiac didn’t know why. When she asked Daddy, she didn’t get but an irritated shrug.

Daddy didn’t like not knowing stuff.

Pontiac didn’t either. That’s why she read all the f—-damn time, to the exasperation of Billy May and the sullenness of Daddy, who glared at her books like they were better men, none of whom needed hooch before facing the day. Mr. Lovecraft, her current choice, designed sentences as serpentine as anything in the swamp. They had rippling scales, dripping fangs.

It lumbered slobberingly into sight, he wrote.

Armed with a book like this, nothing at Bob Fireman’s could spook Pontiac.

This 618-page tome was the only protection she had since her best friend, Billy May, had claimed he was too tired to come to the carny, when the truth was he was too chicken. Pontiac was rip-snorting mad. She and Billy May always went to Bob Fireman’s, on January 8 and June 23 both. Billy always said he could hear the carny’s trucks rumbling all the way from New Orleans.

A fib, naturally. But fibs aren’t quite lies. Fibs are truths stretched taffy-thin to make life more interesting. Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel Carnival was a cathedral built to the glory of fibbing. You couldn’t turn your head without bonking into the best fibs you ever saw.

THE WORLD’S SCARIEST RIDE—she doubted that!

$5 TO SEE INDIA’S BIGGEST RAT—try again, suckers!

YOU CAN’T ESCAPE THE MUTANT MAZE—you wanna bet?

That was the trickiest, stickiest part of fibs. Spit them often enough and they piled thick and crusted hard like wasp nests. Daddy said New Orleans was built on “fibs, lies, and fabrications,” the three pillars keeping the city from going glug-glug-glug into the quag. Down here your lungs breathed fibs right along with Bradford pear, Confederate jasmine, Creole mirepoix, and fresh beignets—and the bad stuff too, the flood mold, hot-trash crawfish shells, tourist-buggy horse s—, and Bourbon Street’s hobo funk of liquor, piss, and puke. What didn’t end up in a New Orleanian’s blood ended up filling every pothole in the Quarter—a bubbly black tarn of viscid vice.

Some Pointers called it “nasty-sugar.” It’d get you flying high, yes’m, but it’d gobble your insides too, sure as four dogs have four assholes.

Pontiac splashed through a moat of water spangles and ducked under a spruce-pine bend, and suddenly there was Bob Fireman’s Wagon Wheel. Carousel lights flashed like wet teeth and greasy treats exhaled like hot breath.

Right inside, waiting for her—and her alone—was the Chamber of Dragons. Pontiac’s pores oozed cane sugar. It hurt. She ran her fingertips over the octopus carving in her book and thought about turning tail like Billy May, heading back home.

If things did lumber at Bob Fireman’s, if things did

slobber, it was inside the Chamber.

Cover images by Evangeline Gallagher; MaxyM/Shutterstock.com (texture). Published by Union Square & Co.

Pay the Piper is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.

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