Titan Books will give Return of the Living Dead: The Official Novelization a new hardcover printing on March 30, 2027, resurrecting John A. Russo‘s original 1978 novel for readers who only know the title from Dan O’Bannon’s punk soaked 1985 film.
Russo cowrote Night of the Living Dead with George Romero before striking out on his own, with results that diverged sharply from Romero’s own. The novel follows warehouse workers Frank and Freddy, who stumble on a secret military experiment and accidentally release a gas that reanimates the dead as flesh eating ghouls across Louisville, Kentucky, with their boss and a mysterious mortician dragged into the outbreak alongside them. It is a considerably more sombre book than the gallows comedy most fans associate with Tarman and company, since it arrived seven years before that film took the story in its own, much funnier direction.
Titan’s marketing copy leans into the self aware humour that has always set the Russo penned side of this franchise apart from its film.
The new edition runs 208 pages, lists for $20 in hardcover, with an ebook arriving the same day, and can be preordered now through Penguin Random House ahead of its spring date. It follows Titan’s hardcover reissue of Night of the Living Dead: The Official Novelization, Russo’s other, more straightforwardly canonical contribution to the genre he helped invent, suggesting the publisher intends to keep working through his catalogue one reanimation at a time. Russo’s full bibliography is also available through Titan Books.
Horror readers who only know Return of the Living Dead through chemical drums and dancing skeletons now have a chance to meet the book that started it all, decades before anyone thought to make it funny.
