Disposable Lit Reviews

Pocket Books, 1974/1981
176 pp.
ISBN 0-671-83573-4
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You might be excited to know that there actually are limits to my stupidity. For instance, I’m not enough of a fool to believe that I could review George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and actually have something original or insightful to say at this late date. It’s an astounding piece of cinema, and has been recognized as such for over thirty years, and thus every pseudo-academic film critic has already sopped up every bit of meaning from the film and regurgitated in hundreds of reviews and commentaries and analyses and whatever.

But since I wanted a book review that would tie in with [link]Month of the Living Dead, I did something uncommon for me: I sought out a copy of the novel on eBay, specifically to review it. Because, while George Romero’s version may beyond my capacities, John Russo’s novelization is very much fair game.

John Russo. The man’s gotten himself a reputation somewhere between “extreme dumbass” and “Lucifer incarnate.” He started out as co-scripter of the original Night of the Living Dead, and things kinda went downhill from there. He made some more movies after that, which you may be able to find in your corner video store: Heartstopper (based on his own novel The Awakening), Midnight, and The Majorettes are the most common ones. None of them managed to win friends and influence people, and his budgets got smaller and smaller, until he started doing shot-on-video cheapies like Midnight 2 and Santa Claws. He’s also the man responsible for one of the most reviled motion picture projects in history, the 30th Anniversary “Special Edition” of Night of the Living Dead, which introduces roughly twenty minutes of new footage (containing new, unrelated characters) and trims a similar amount of the original movie to make room for it.

From that bio, it looks like the man’s due for one of the lower levels of the Inferno. But let’s look at it a little closer: There’s actually a good reason for the Special Edition falderall, that being that there have always been copyright problems with Night of the Living Dead, which prevented cast members from seeing much at all in the way of residual payments; the Special Edition, with that much new footage, could qualify as an original derivative work and get a new copyright, thus allowing for some long-delayed income for the cast. It doesn’t make the movie any better, but at least it substitutes a better motivation for garden-variety money-grubbing.

It’s also interesting to note that Heartstopper, The Majorettes, and Midnight 2 each provided the background for a filmmaking book by Russo; in that order, the books use those movies to show how to make a movie on a budget of $1,000,000, $100,000, or $10,000 respectively (given the trend, I’m kinda scared to see a new book: “Making Movies on Change Found in the Couch Cushions“). Whatever you think of the movies, the books are very informative and valuable from a technical filmmaking standpoint.

So. After all of that — the surface evil, and the mitigating details behind the outer appearance — we finally come to the subject of this review: Russo’s novelization of Night of the Living Dead, written in 1974 and reprinted several times since (though currently out of print). Russo has written several other novels since then (many of them either based on his movies or the basis for a feature), but as far as I can tell, this was his first novel.

Is it any good?

Well, let’s put it this way: It’s not Ultimate Evil. But, like most of Russo’s career, it’s not going to win him any friends.

My chief fear on cracking the cover was that this novelization would be the source for the new characters of the Special Edition, which most viewers found both odious and completely unnecessary. The good news is that said characters don’t appear here; the novelization follows the movie closely.

The bad news is that the novel follows the movie closely.

See, movies and prose are very different story-telling media. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and thus the stories told in one medium may not translate well to the other. And when you have such a fabulous piece of cinema as Night of the Living Dead, it’s to be strongly suspected that a straight translation will leave behind a lot of what makes the work powerful in its original medium. Which is exactly what happens.

The story is familiar to fans of the movie. Brother-and-sister Barbara and Johnny visit their father’s secluded gravesite, and Johnny gets et by a zombie. Barbara manages to get to a farmhouse, where she’s joined by Ben, who barricades the place, and then spends the rest of the time in a power struggle with Harry, the middle-class family man who’s been hiding in the cellar with his family.

It’s exactly like the movie, and that’s exactly what the novel delivers: Exactly what you see on the screen. In fact, at some points it feels like you’re reading a transcription of someone’s viewing experience. And that’s just sad, because novel based on the movie (rather than a strict “novelization,” which is what this is) has the potential to explore so much of the depth that makes the movie work.

For instance, every character trapped in the farmhouse is seeking some framework from which to control the inexplicable events around them. Everybody says, “If we could just do this…” over and over again. Ben throws himself into fortifying the ground floor because it’s a task he can accomplish. Harry desperately wants to dub himself Alpha Male, because the conflict with Ben is a conflict he can understand and conceiably win, and as long as he’s concentrating on that battle he doesn’t have to actually think about the fact that the corpses of the dead are eating the living. Teenager Tom tries valiantly to choose between Ben and Harry, because as soon as he finds an authority figure, he can hand the reins off to him. And everybody hangs on every word from the radio and the TV — not to tell them what to do (they’ve already figured out “Don’t get caught and don’t get eaten”), but to tell them what’s going on; to give them an explanation which will allow them to comprehend and control the uncontrollable situation. In counterpoint to all of this is Barbara, who spends most of the movie in near catatonia; her up-close-and-personal experience with the dead was simply something she couldn’t fit into her mind and interpret, and it destroyed her mind.

None of this is new — it’s all easily found in the countless essays written on the movie in the last thirty-odd years, and it’s a pretty easy reading of the movie. But it could also have been the grand unifying concept of the novel, explored at a greater depth in a way that a film simply can’t do without becoming overly talky and didactic.

Yup, it would have been great if the novel had tackled any of this. But it didn’t.

So, stripped of the power of the actual images, and unwilling to go where the film did not, the novel simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t contribute. It doesn’t elicit any of the emotional response of the movie, except insofar as it brings to the reader’s mind the movie itself. In which case, you might as well just go and watch the movie again, instead of getting it second-hand.

Nathan Shumate