Epidemic of the Living Dead

By: John Russo

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

From the screenwriter of the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead comes a shocking new wave of zombie mayhem to devour your dreams - and feed your nightmares....

THEY ARE WHAT THEY EAT

It starts with infected needles. It spreads like a plague. Soon the town of Chapel Grove, Pennsylvania, is overrun with cannibalistic corpses. Some are taken down with a bullet to the brain. Others, torched like kindling. But a few have survived - inside a maternity ward....

THEY'RE EATING FOR TWO NOW

Detective Bill Curtis manages to rescue his pregnant wife, Lauren, from the ward in the nick of time. But the other pregnant women are not so lucky. Some of them have been bitten - and infected. Now it's anyone's guess what's growing inside them....

THEY'RE THE NEXT GENERATION

But the nightmare isn't over, yet. The infected mothers' newborns appear to be normal. But as the years go by, Bill and Lauren Curtis begin to worry about their beautiful, healthy daughter Jodie. Jodie is drawn to the town's "special" children, the ones whose mothers were bitten. They're reaching adolescence now. Their hormones are raging. And they're starting to possess strange appetites....

Contains mature themes.

©2018 John Russo (P)2018 Tantor

A little different!

This book definitely had an unexpected twist from the typical zombie book. I enjoyed the new take on an old genre. I would recommend to give this book a try. I will be checking out the next book!

On second thought….

After giving this book a second listen - I’m still not wild about the inclusion of vampire teens in a Night/Return of the Living Dead sequel, however there are some interesting aspects of the story that make this book worth checking out if you’re a fan of Pittsburgh lensed zombie productions.

First of all, remember Night of the Living Dead the 30th Anniversary Edition from 1998? When John Russo wrote and directed fifteen minutes of new footage that blended with the original footage so well you could barely tell what was new. Remember how it wasn’t jarring? Anyway, the new footage included a reverend character who was all about spiking the recently dead through the skull so they wouldn’t reanimate. That character is in this book. Different last name, same exact character. Which makes this book a sequel to Night of the Living Dead 1998 the 30th Anniversary Edition.

But hold on, I know you’re thinking. I used to collect Fangoria. Wasn’t there some talk at the time of making a sequel to Night of the Living Dead ‘98, and it was going to carry on the story of the skull spiking reverend? You’re absolutely right - I totally remember that. Whatever became of that proposed sequel?

Executive producer Joseph Wolf gave the production to his daughter as a graduation present is what happened, and three years later a movie arrived on the shelves of Blockbuster Video that Tom Savini will regret for the rest of his life - Children of the Living Dead. It’s worth watching as an example of one of the most inept and amateurish zombie movies ever made. Excluding shot on video movies - film only. It was taken out of John Russo’s hands and rewritten, so you can’t blame him for the story, or the acting, music, cinematography, etc…. If some of the stories are true about film being loaded into the camera backwards for an entire day (the day they had the most zombie extras, for the film’s biggest scene), DP Bill Hinzman (yes, HIM) deserves some of the blame for its overall crumminess.

Anyway, it turns out there are some major plot elements in Epidemic of the Living Dead that mirror Children of the Living Dead. I don’t know if John Russo has confirmed this anywhere, but I think Epidemic of the Living Dead provides us fan-nerds with a glimpse of Children of the Living Dead as it was originally envisioned by John Russo and Russ Streiner. If the ever-expanding history of semi-official, unofficial, and unmade Night of the Living Dead sequels is of interest to you, this book is worth a listen. Definitely check out Epidemic of the Dead, and then if you haven’t already, pick up a used copy of The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh or you’re not really a Night of the Living Dead fan.

🤭 Just kidding. Of course you’re a fan or you wouldn’t be reading a review of Epidemic of the Living Dead.