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Thursday, August 29, 2024

#HorrorForLibraries Giveaway: Raising the Dead: The War of George A. Romero

This week I have a hard cover, finished copy of a nonfiction book that I am offering in celebration of the release of another book (for which I only have a PDF). More details below, but first here are the rules for the giveaway:

  1. You need to be affiliated with an American Library. My rationale behind that is that I will be encouraging you to read these books and share them with patrons. While many of them are advanced reader copies that you cannot add to your collections, if you get the chance to read them, my hope is that you will consider ordering a copy for your library and give away the ARC away as a prize or pass it on to a fellow staff member.
  2. If you are interested in being included in any giveaway at any time, you must email me at zombiegrl75 [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line "#HorrorForLibraries." In the body of the email all you have to say is that you want to be entered and the name of your library.
  3. Each entry will be considered for EVERY giveaway. Meaning you enter once, and you are entered until you win. I will randomly draw a winner on Fridays sometime after 5pm central. But only entries received by 5pm each week will be considered for that week. I use Random.org and have a member of my family witness the "draw"based off your number in the Google Sheet.
  4. If you win, you are ineligible to win again for 4 weeks; you will have to re-enter after that time to be considered [I have a list of who has won, when, and what title]. However, if you do not win, you carry over into the next week. There is NO NEED to reenter.

Click here to see the previous giveaway. Our winner was Matt from Haymarket Gainesville [VA] Library. Now on to this week's giveaway.

On Tuesday, Pay the Piper by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus releases. I reviewed it in the July issue of Booklist here. Please click through to read everything I had to say about this fascinating book, one that readers will be clamoring for, but here is an excerpt:

Bestselling author Kraus’ work with the Romero archive [The Living Dead] has unearthed another partially finished novel. Set in 1998 in the Louisiana swamp, Alligator Point is a dying community where Pirates once ruled the waterways, octopus carvings are everywhere, and “The Piper” has stalked the town for generations. Opening with a tandem of unsettling scenes, Kraus and Romero build an unforgettable cast of characters whose alternating perspectives bring “The Point” to life, including Pete, the John Wayne obsessed sheriff and nine year-old, Ponitac. The pervasive unease and steady pacing lead readers eagerly to the book’s final third, where it all breaks wide open, violently revealing the epic root of the terror. A great action packed Horror novel, Pay the Piper also dives deeper, telling a story about revenge and regret that offers real hope. For fans of waterlogged, Southern Gothic, with monsters that prey off the complicated history of a land and its people such as Evil Whispers by Goingback, The Boatmans’ Daughter by Davidson, and The Toll by Priest. 

Click here for a lot more about this book.

Now as I said above, I do not have a paper ARC for this book to giveaway, but it is coming out on Tuesday and you NEED to have this one in all library collections.

However, there is an adjacent nonfiction book from a respected academic press that came out this year, a title you should also consider adding to your collections, a book that was a direct result of the author using the Romero Archive just as Pay the Piper came out of the archive.

It is, Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero by Adam Charles Hart from Oxford University Press. From Goodreads:
George A. Romero never intended to become a master of horror, but Night of the Living Dead made him a legend of the genre. Raising the Dead dives into the expansive, extraordinary body of work found in Romero's archive, going beyond his iconic zombie movies into a deep and varied collection of writings that never made it to the big screen. From the early 1960s until his death in 2017, Romero was a hugely prolific writer, producing scripts in every conceivable genre, from arty medieval allegories to wacky comedies to grand-scale science fiction epics. Though he had difficulty funding non-horror projects, he continued to write in whatever mode his imagination dictated, and he rarely abandoned his ideas. Themes, story ideas, and even characters were re-purposed for new scripts, evolving and transforming with each new iteration and, sometimes, finding a home in a horror film. But in order to accommodate ideas that began in such different contexts, Romero would have to change the horror genre a zombie movie could become a savage satire of consumerism or an excoriating critique of militaristic or capitalist hierarchies. The horror genre became what Romero made of it. Based on years of archival research, the book moves between unfilmed scripts and familiar classics, showing the remarkable scope and range of Romero's interests and the full extent of his genius. Raising the Dead is a testament to an extraordinarily productive and inventive artist who never let the restrictions of the film industry limit his imagination.

Thanks to the author and Oxford University Press, I have a finished hard cover of this book to giveaway to one of you. You can add this well researched book that utilized the treasures that are made available in the Romero Archive at Pitt to add to the larger conversation about the directors importance in our world-- all of our world, not just the Horror parts.

And again, it is similar to Pay the Piper in that way. Kraus brought this non-zombie, unfinished Romero novel back from the dead (pun intended). The difference though is all of you will add the novel, you may not get this excellent nonfiction book. 

Enter now to win this copy that can be put on the shelf, but also, all of you reading this, consider adding it to your collections.

And make sure your Pay the Piper books are ready to go Tuesday. This novel is going to be very popular.

Good Luck

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