Pay the Piper by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus
Sweat-drenched swamps hide an evil entity...
Yes, that George A. Romero.
After the death of the legendary horror movie auteur, author Daniel Kraus discovered a half-finished manuscript that Romero had been working on: a tale of a dying community in the deepest, swampiest, forgotten ass-end of Louisiana. And of an ancient horror that’s praying on the folk living and drinking and dying there.
Kraus, who had previously completely Romero’s other unfinished novel, The Living Dead, worked closely with Romero’s estate to complete Pay the Piper, although it is notable that Romero left few clues as to his story’s final destination. So while this is novel is a collaboration of sorts, a more apt comparison might be a jazz jam where one musician initiates a tune, and another takes it over and goes his own way with it.
Regardless, the book holds together well and is remarkably cohesive in style. I imagine that Kraus polished what already existed of Romero’s manuscript and, in turn, emulated Romero’s voice through his own writing to complete the novel.
What results is a slow-burn horror novel that is much more atmospheric and character-focused that one might expect from the undisputed king of zombie movies. The authors do a fantastic job of evoking the setting of the bayou; the book is heavily saturated in Cajun culture and thick with the sense of sweltering humidity.
As to the horror itself? It creeps in gradually and covertly. The book’s emphasis is largely the real-world nature of its setting and the rundown, makeshift lives of the people that have lived on Alligator Point for generations… How the adults are mostly hopeless alcoholics slowly drinking themselves to death, how there is a single school with a single teacher who lives a hermetic non-existence outside of work, how a mysterious oil man is buying up property from families desperate to leave — dwindling the precarious population even further.
At the center of it all is a nine-year-old girl named Pontiac. She is a firecracker if there ever was one: super smart, incredibly observant, and far wiser than her years regarding the world that she calls home.
But there is an evil in the swamps. Children are being seduced from the safe havens of their shanty homes in the dead of night and led off into the darkness, never to be seen again. A ragtag cast of characters separately seek answers: most notably young Pontiac, the aforementioned teacher, Miss Ward, and the John Wayne-obsessed sheriff, Pete Roosevelt.
If the above description evokes the folktale The Pied-Piper of Hamlin, you’ll be glad to know that Pay the Piper does, in fact, reference it directly — and more pointedly the phrase itself “pay the pipe” …eventually.
This is not a horror book where the monster is in the foreground necessarily. It is in occasion, sure, but the book is far more focused on its people and its setting — and the very human instinct to acknowledge that something bad has happened but to avoid addressing it appropriately.
As a result, this is a story where the creeping evil is permitted to slowly infiltrate the world, quietly growing in strength until it can be denied no more and must be confronted.
Pay the Piper is a literary horror book that evokes both Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft (paying tribute to the former and reckoning with the latter), but is entirely its own thing — and is most assuredly from the brains of a filmmaker known to be a progressive, leftist activist.