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Book Review : George A. Romero & Susanna Sparrow - Dawn of the Dead (1978)


Order DAWN OF THE DEAD here

The trooper stared straight into Roger's eyes, his level gaze never once flinching. That's the gaze of a coldblooded killer, thought Roger. But it's also the gaze of a man who's seen everything, done everything, and just doesn't have the patience or the time to be afraid.

Going mainstream is the absolute worst thing that can happen to ideas. Sacred monsters had a terrible go at large audiences over the last decade. It was vampires at first, but zombies were drained of all their identity and their meaning by corporate entertainment soon after: there were dead zombies, sick zombies, slow zombies, quick zombies, conscious zombies, zombies in love, zombies however you wanted them. It's probably why I wanted to turn back the clock and read about the zombies that originally struck fear in America's heart, so I did something weird and read the novelization of George A. Romero's legendary Dawn of the Dead, co-written with Susanna Sparrow and it did dust off a couple important things.

So, the dead have risen from their grave to feed on the living. Society is collapsing and every city is turning into their own private hell, yet it's impossible to know the extent of the situation because communications and infrastructures are gone. A rag-tag group of survivors is trying to survive their way out of a Philadelphia mall and into an unknown, yet fortunately more stable future, but everywhere they turn, there are waves and waves of the undead coming at them from every direction. That's it, really. There's been a corruption in the food chain and the living are now being hunted for their flesh, but for strange and wrong reasons.

I don't know if zombies were turned into a sacred monster in order to a) express fear of a humanity that renounced its free will for immediate urges or b) simply as a mean to have a soulless, karma free enemy to slaughter now that the Nazis were gone, but going back to George A. Romero and Dawn of the Dead re-established a few points: a) zombies are dead people b) They are scary because they're a lot. There's A LOT more people under the soil than walking the Earth. c) I still have no idea how they find the strength to rise from the grave, really. Zombie apocalypse would be quite manageable without diabolical, superhuman strength even it is a transmittable disease. d) Romero's nightmare would probably never happen in real life.

"They attack...each other," Roger said slowly as he reached the trooper's side.

"Just the fresh corpses...before they revive," the man told him softly.

"Why did these people keep them here?" Roger asked. "Why don't they turn them over...or...or destroy them themselves? It's insane...Why do they do it?"

"'Cause they still believe there's respect in dying,' the man said as he fired into the head of another squirming zombie.

But, is the book good? The book. Right, the book. It's surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be, just perhaps a little unloved. Dawn of the Dead has a tough time hiding its nature. It's a byproduct, not an original creation. Don't get me wrong, Susanna Sparrow is very competent at what she does and her action scenes are quite fun and engrossing, They are fast moving, not complicated and better written than most, given that action scenes are tough to get right. The quality of writing takes a bizarre nose dive about halfway through and Dawn of the Dead starts pulling this atrocity that is exclamation marks, indicating the book was most likely under a strict deadline.

So, there you have it. I don't have a proper excuse for agreeing to review a novelization, but I thought it was an interesting exercise mainly because I haven't watched the movie. Otherwise, I don't even know why these things exist. Are there really people who like cult movies out there, but are so intellectually lazy they prefer renewing their old experiences in new forms rather than chasing new ones? For what it's worth, Dawn of the Dead is a competent byproduct and it could teach a thing or two about writing strong action scenes, but should it exist? That is an entirely other debate we should get into on Facebook after you're done reading this.

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