Now, here’s the nicely complicated part of this.

In 2011, St. Martin’s Griffin published my novel, Dead of Night, which was my attempt to tell the story of the rise of the living dead with as much plausible science as possible. I wrote it for a couple of reasons. First, because I was always a little frustrated that zombie stories seemed to start with things in motion. Even Night of the Living Dead starts hours after the outbreak. These stories skip over the cause, or gloss over it. Romero certainly did. His movie had characters alluding to the possibility that it was radiation from a returning space probe as the root of the plague. This bothered me, even as a kid, because there wasn’t enough science behind it. I was a science nerd and that explanation made no sense. So, I wanted to tell a story that gave the science. Not just a passing reference to a “disease,” but the science of the disease. I worked with a number of top experts in epidemiology, infectious diseases and parasitology to come up with as reasonable an explanation as natural science, bioweapons research, and genetics could manage. What disturbed me was how close I was able to get to something that could be concocted in a biological warfare lab. Luckily no one has been insane enough to authorize, let alone fund this; and Mother Nature, even at her crankiest, couldn’t create it.

The other reason I wanted to write the book was to honor George Romero. He was always one of my favorite people. I loved his movies, and (as a young man) read countless interviews with him and he seemed like a truly decent guy. Later, after I was working in the horror field and doing the convention circuit, I got to meet and become friends with him. And, yeah, nice guy for sure. Whip-smart, funny, inventive and humble.

So, I dedicated Dead of Night to him. I later found out that he really enjoyed the book. A lot. In late 2015 I reached out to George to see if he’d give me his blessing to edit an anthology of stories set, approximately, in the forty-eight hours surrounding his landmark movie. We spoke on the phone at length and he said he’d agree under three conditions. The first was that he wanted to co-edit it with me. Not a problem. Second, he wanted to write a story for the anthology. Again, all good with me. And third, because he loved Dead of Night and its sequel, Fall of Night, so much, he asked that I write a story that specifically connected the events of those books with the events in Night of the Living Dead. He told me that as far as he was concerned, my books were the official “backstory” of his movies.

Yeah. I’m a grown-ass man, but that put tears in my eyes.

And so I did that. The short story “Lone Gunman” picks up a few minutes after the events of Fall of Night, and does indeed take the main character, Sam Imura, into that ill-fated house from Romero’s first film. The anthology George Romero and I did together was Nights of the Living Dead, and was published by St. Martin’s Griffin in 2017. It was the last project George completed before he passed, and I was actually at a book signing five days after the book’s debut when we got the call that he had died. I grieved then and grieve now, but I also celebrate with a full heart at how much he brought to the world of horror entertainment. Try to find anyone who doesn’t know what a zombie is. You can’t. It’s a global cultural phenomenon.