Daniel Kraus has once again teamed up with the late George A. Romero for a new supernatural horror, Pay the Piper, coming to bookstores everywhere in September 2024.
After successfully completing The Living Dead in 2020, where Kraus tackled the challenging task of finishing George A. Romero’s partially written novel, Daniel is now set to undertake the completion of the unfinished manuscript for Pay the Piper. Daniel Kraus worked closely with the Romero estate to bring this unfinished work to us all.
While exploring the University of Pittsburgh Library’s System’s George A. Romero Archival Collection in 2020, Kraus discovered an unfinished novel titled Pay the Piper. After obtaining approval from the Romero estate, Daniel completed his second and final collaboration with the esteemed writer.
“It has been the highest honor of my life to shepherd Romero’s incomplete novels to a finished state,” said Kraus. “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.”
Kraus, a New York Times bestselling author, has an impressive track record. He collaborated with Guillermo del Toro on novels such as The Shape of Water and Trollhunters, the former an adaptation of the feature film and the latter became a Emmy-winning Netflix series. Kraus also wrote the highly successful Whalefall in 2023, now optioned for a feature film and named Capes and Tights 2023 Book of the Year.
Pay the Piper is available for pre-order and will hit bookstores everywhere on September 3, 2024.
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.
