Writer Daniel Kraus joins the Capes and Tights Podcast for Episode 119 on August 2, 2023. To prepare for the conversation, we have compiled nine novels or comics by Kraus you should read now.
Daniel Kraus is a New York Times bestselling writer of novels, TV, and film. His collaboration with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero was acclaimed by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Kraus has won the Bram Stoker Award, Scribe Award, two Odyssey Awards, and has appeared multiple times as Library Guild selections, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, and more.
Kraus has had a long and great career and this is just a taste of what you can expect from the writer.
Trojan (AWA Studios)
Once upon a time, we lived alongside Legends. Creatures of myth. Centaurs, fauns, gorgons, kelpies, gnomes, and more. They were spectacular. Majestic. Powerful. Peaceful. Pure. In comparison, we were ugly. Weak. Warmongering. Rotten. Is it any wonder we could not live alongside them any longer? After driving these Legends to the fringes of society, an uglier form of mythos takes shape in the form of rumors of live snuff shows for dark web high rollers. When a mysterious young woman, Nessa, enlists the help of a hacker to take a tour of the grisliest corners of the Dark Web, she sets in motion a war between those who peddle to mankind’s darkest fantasies and a world that transcends imagination. Trojan is fantasy thriller full of wonder and horror in equal measure.
Trojan is available in trade paperback or digitally via ComiXology.
The Shape of Water (Feiwel & Friends / MacMillan)
It is 1962, and Elisa Esposito―mute her whole life, orphaned as a child―is struggling with her humdrum existence as a janitor working the graveyard shift at Baltimore’s Occam Aerospace Research Center. Were it not for Zelda, a protective coworker, and Giles, her loving neighbor, she doesn’t know how she’d make it through the day.
Then, one fateful night, she sees something she was never meant to see, the Center’s most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man, captured in the Amazon, to be studied for Cold War advancements. The creature is terrifying but also magnificent, capable of language and of understanding emotions…and Elisa can’t keep away. Using sign language, the two learn to communicate. Soon, affection turns into love, and the creature becomes Elisa’s sole reason to live.
But outside forces are pressing in. Richard Strickland, the obsessed soldier who tracked the asset through the Amazon, wants nothing more than to dissect it before the Russians get a chance to steal it. Elisa has no choice but to risk everything to save her beloved. With the help of Zelda and Giles, Elisa hatches a plan to break out the creature. But Strickland is on to them. And the Russians are, indeed, coming.
Developed from the ground up as a bold two-tiered release―one story interpreted by two artists in the independent mediums of literature and film―The Shape of Water is unlike anything you’ve ever read or seen.
You can read The Shape of Water in book form or audiobook.
Trollhunters (Disney-Hyperion)
Jim Sturges is your typical teen in suburban San Bernardino-one with an embarrassingly overprotective dad, a best friend named “Tubby” who shares his hatred of all things torturous (like gym class), and a crush on a girl who doesn’t know he exists. But everything changes for Jim when a 45-year old mystery resurfaces, threatening the lives of everyone in his seemingly sleepy town. Soon Jim has to team up with a band of unlikely (and some un-human) heroes to battle the monsters he never knew existed.
From the minds of Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus comes a new illustrated novel about the fears that move in unseen places.
Trollhunters is available in digital or paper format.
The Autumnal (Vault Comics)
Following the death of her estranged mother, Kat Somerville and her daughter Sybil flee a difficult life in Chicago for the quaint-and possibly deadly-town of Comfort Notch, New Hampshire. From NY Times best-selling author, Daniel Kraus (The Shape of Water, Trollhunters, The Living Dead), and rising star Chris Shehan, comes a haunting vision of America’s prettiest autumn.
The Autumnal is available in collected trade paperback or digitally on ComiXology.
Rotters (Ember)
Grave-robbing. What kind of monster would do such a thing? It’s true that Leonardo da Vinci did it, Shakespeare wrote about it, and the resurrection men of nineteenth-century Scotland practically made it an art. But none of this matters to Joey Crouch, a sixteen-year-old straight-A student living in Chicago with his single mom. For the most part, Joey’s life is about playing the trumpet and avoiding the daily humiliations of high school.
Everything changes when Joey’s mother dies in a tragic accident and he is sent to rural Iowa to live with the father he has never known, a strange, solitary man with unimaginable secrets. At first, Joey’s father wants nothing to do with him, but once father and son come to terms with each other, Joey’s life takes a turn both macabre and exhilarating.
Daniel Kraus’s masterful plotting and unforgettable characters make Rotters a moving, terrifying, and unconventional epic about fathers and sons, complex family ties, taboos, and the ever-present specter of mortality.
Read Rotters on Kindle, in paperback or audiobook.
The Living Dead (Tor / MacMillan)
New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus completes George A. Romero’s brand-new masterpiece of zombie horror, the massive novel left unfinished at Romero’s death!
George A. Romero invented the modern zombie with Night of the Living Dead, creating a monster that has become a key part of pop culture. Romero often felt hemmed in by the constraints of film-making. To tell the story of the rise of the zombies and the fall of humanity the way it should be told, Romero turned to fiction. Unfortunately, when he died, the story was incomplete.
Enter Daniel Kraus, co-author, with Guillermo del Toro, of the New York Times bestseller The Shape of Water (based on the Academy Award-winning movie) and Trollhunters (which became an Emmy Award-winning series), and author of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch (an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year). A lifelong Romero fan, Kraus was honored to be asked, by Romero’s widow, to complete The Living Dead.
Set in the present day, The Living Dead is an entirely new tale, the story of the zombie plague as George A. Romero wanted to tell it.
It begins with one body.
A pair of medical examiners find themselves battling a dead man who won’t stay dead.
It spreads quickly.
In a Midwestern trailer park, a Black teenage girl and a Muslim immigrant battle newly-risen friends and family. On a US aircraft carrier, living sailors hide from dead ones while a fanatic makes a new religion out of death. At a cable news station, a surviving anchor keeps broadcasting while his undead colleagues try to devour him. In DC, an autistic federal employee charts the outbreak, preserving data for a future that may never come.
Everywhere, people are targeted by both the living and the dead.
We think we know how this story ends.
The Living Dead is available in audiobook or paperback!
Year Zero, Vol. 0 (AWA Studios)
In this action-packed prelude to the hit series, acclaimed horror writer Daniel Kraus (George Romero’s The Living Dead, The Autumnal) unveils four globe-spanning tales from the earliest days of the zombie apocalypse when even the wildest rumors couldn’t measure up to the horror to come. A streetwise Russian cop patrols the back alleys of the opportunistic black market that emerges in response to the crisis…a North Korean soldier observes strange happenings on the DMZ…An E.R. nurse in the rural South fights to protect her hospital from threats without and within…A transgender flight attendant who has observed disturbing clues as she crisscrosses the globe keeps a wary eye on the passenger in seat 23C.
Year Zero, Vol. 0 can be read via ComiXology or trade paperback.
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch (Simon & Schuster)
May 7, 1896.
Dusk. A swaggering seventeen-year-old gangster named Zebulon Finch is gunned down by the shores of Lake Michigan. But after mere minutes in the void, he is mysteriously resurrected.
His second life will be nothing like his first.
Zebulon’s new existence begins as a sideshow attraction in a traveling medicine show. From there he will be poked and prodded by a scientist obsessed with mastering the secrets of death. He will fight in the trenches of World War I. He will run from his nightmares—and from poverty—in Depression-era New York City. And he will become the companion of the most beautiful woman in Hollywood.
Love, hate, hope, and horror—Zebulon finds them. But will he ever find redemption?
Read the complete boxset of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch!
Whalefall (MTV Books / Simon & Schuster)
The Martian meets 127 Hours in this “powerfully humane” (Owen King, New York Times bestselling author) and scientifically accurate thriller about a scuba diver who’s been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.
Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand—to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it’s a long shot, but Jay feels it’s the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad’s death by suicide the previous year.
The dive begins well enough, but the sudden appearance of a giant squid puts Jay in very real jeopardy, made infinitely worse by the arrival of a sperm whale looking to feed. Suddenly, Jay is caught in the squid’s tentacles and drawn into the whale’s mouth where he is pulled into the first of its four stomachs. He quickly realizes he has only one hour before his oxygen tanks run out—one hour to defeat his demons and escape the belly of a whale.
Suspenseful and cinematic, Whalefall is an “astoundingly great” (Gillian Flynn, New York Times bestselling author) thriller about a young man who has given up on life…only to find a reason to live in the most dangerous and unlikely of places.
Whalefall hits bookstores everywhere on August 8, 2023. Be sure to pre-order at your local bookstore or online!
