Return of the Living Dead

[justin]

John Russo - Return Of The Living Dead (Hamlyn, 1979)

Blurb:
A bus overturns in a quiet American town, and soon the entire neighbourhood is filled with death and terror as corpses rise from their graves.

No one is safe from these ghouls in their hunger for human flesh.

The whole country could perish in a bloodbath of nightmarish horror.

John Russo's paperback sequel to the film Night of the Living Dead seems to be one of the rarer items on the Hamlyn list. I've only ever seen two copies, one on e-bay which alerted me to its existence (which sold for a king's ransom) and the slightly battered one I've purchased from Maurice at Zardoz.

Return of the Living Dead very much reads like a film script that was whipped off the shelf, ahd the dust blown off it and and was quickly worked up into a paperback- punchy dialogue, impressive set-pieces, very little character development and minimal description.

It never quite lives up to its great opening sequence which turns your expectations on its head. A funeral in the sort of US community that brings to mind that famous painting of the guy holding a pitchfork in fromt of a barn. It's a slightly dull scene ridden with cliche 'til the priest presiding the ceremony pulls out a spike and drives it through the corpse's skull! It seems that this community hasn't forgotten the grisly events of ten years earlier as seen in Night of the Living Dead.

And they're about to get an even more powerful reminder when the police stop this vigilant community from spiking all 30 of the victims of a fatal bus crash!

Russo's zombies are the creatures of NotLD with sufficient intelligence to use implements and weapons, not the dumb consumer zombies of Dawn of the Dead.

I'm about half-way through and after the first house-under-seige sequence I don't feel too inclined to go much further. It bears little resemblance the film Return of the Living Dead other than its use of a mortuary and a funeral home. (A great film by the way, which I remember going to see a the cinema in the same year as Terminator and Day of the Dead)

NEL did reprint a Pocket Books novelisation of Night of the Living Dead penned by Russo. The original copyright date is 1974 and it has a great introduction from Romero. Pocket Books printed it in 1981 and NEL in 1983, but I suspect there was an earlier version.

[dem]

Justin, i've scanned in the cover and added a date (1979 is right, isn't it ?). Here's an alternative cover (Commonwealth, 1996) borrowed from Fantastic Fiction which seems reasonable enough as i seem to recognise plenty of our scans on there ....

Nov 29, 2008 9:30:40 GMT justin said:

Return of the Living Dead very much reads like a film script that was whipped off the shelf, ahd the dust blown off it and and was quickly worked up into a paperback- punchy dialogue, impressive set-pieces, very little character development and minimal description.

His Night Of The Living Dead for NEL is like that too, a very minimalist approach to character and so faithful to the script it reads more like a transcript than a novel.

[allthingshorror]

Here's another cover to the book - this is the 2nd version of the book he wrote and a direct tie-in to the film.

[lordgorse]

AHHH, I read this one (1979 version) a few months back and it was painful Vast sections of it are lifted directly from Russo's NoTLD novelization. And the zombies!!! They spend half the time standing around, apparently sleeping!?!?!

[erebus]

Ive said it once and I'll say it again, that cover scares me

[dem]

Just finished the Hamlyn version - enjoyed it though, as mentioned by everyone else, it's real bare boned stuff, often too minimalist to make the best use of potentially shocking and horrible set-pieces.

Ten years after the initial outbreak, a bus crash out East claims the lives of all thirty-four passengers. As luck would have it, Reverend Michaels is presiding over the funeral of the nine year old Dorsey girl at the time. The Reverend and his congregation are gloomy bastards and, whatever the authorities claim about the freak zombie epidemic having passed, they like to make certain their dead stay that way. After whacking a nail into the little girl's skull, the faithful descend on the mangled accident victims with mallets and spikes at the ready. Unfortunately, they only manage to peg thirteen of 'em before Sheriff Conan McClennan and his posse arrive. McClennan sees to it that the casualties are shifted to O'Neill's Funeral Parlour where, shortly afterward, they're joined by his deputy who is shot failing to rescue a young woman from a pair of rapists. The kindly Mr. O'Neil soon finds himself surrounded by a bunch of reanimated corpses (i.e., all bar those who've been impaled through the brain) who tear him apart to feast on his yummy flesh before staggering off into the night.

Bert Miller, a particularly joyless member of the grim Reverends flock, is even more cantankerous than ever on account of daughter Karen falling pregnant by a party unknown, believed to be a 'young punk.' His other girls, Ann and Sue Ellen, are still in trauma from assisting in the removal of corpses from the bus when the zombies arrive at their farm. Game old Bert soon comes a cropper (it has to be said his offspring don't seem all that upset) and the girls are 'rescued' by three bogus Troopers, Carter, Flack and Connelly, and their female sidekick, Angel. They also have two bound, gagged prisoners in tow, and "If I told you what they did you'd want to help lynch them". Only Sue Ellen's boyfriend, Billy the biker, suspects that they're not quite the good citizens they claim to be and he's soon proved right - Carter & Co. are a bunch of looters who turn nasty when they crack the combination on the Miller safe to find it contains only junk. Their prisoners, far from being "child molesters" as Flack insists, are honest troopers, Dave Benton and Carl Martinelli. Meanwhile, one of the zombies who did for Bert is biding his time upstairs and Karen has gone into labour. When the sadistic Angel goes to check on the girl, the ghoul pounces ....

Carter and his remaining two hoods make a break for it, taking Ann, Sue Ellen and Billy with them as zombie feed, confident that the ghoul who snacked on Angel will soon be hungry enough to polish off those they've left behind (Benton, the badly wounded Martinelli and Karen).

Next thing we know "Karen died in childbirth but the baby was born", Benton and Martinelli have escaped and are now set on delivering the child to a hospital and rescuing the abducted girls. But, bearing in mind the still-shocking nihilism of Night Of The Living Dead, who - if anyone - will survive?

i'm probably stating-the-bleeding-obvious as usual, but, quite apart from it's dramatic galvanization of the zombie genre, does anyone reckon Night Of The Living Dead pretty much provided the template for the 'When Animals Attack' nasties too? just substitute the walking dead with your rodent/ insect/ reptile of choice .....

one neat product placement moment at the saloon where the token drunk orders a Budweisser and (hooray!) Seagrams 7 chaser!

[davidbanner]

Russo actually wrote two versions of Return of the Living Dead.
The first was published by Hamlyn and seems to be the rarer of the two. It's supposed to be a direct sequel to NoTLD and has all the spikes through the brain action as mentioned above.
The cover promises that the book was "soon to be a major film" but Russo couldn't get the money together (he had split with Romero sometime before) and so the movie went unmade.
The second Return of the Living Dead was published by Arrow and has the cover you can see above.
It has nothing in common with the earlier novel and is a direct novelisation of the comedy-horror movie with the same name.
There's a short disclaimer in the Arrow book in case anybody thought they were the same.
I have two perfect copies of the original Return... and plan on putting one up for sale on evil-bay this week.

[dem]

The body that was in the cracked drum had somehow reconstituted into a black, tarry loathsome skeleton. It spoke in a voice like vomit .... 'Brains, ....... brains' it said in a lustful croak, shuffling toward Tina, raising its arms to clutch and embrace her."

Just hit p.100 of the Arrow edition (as in "the not to be confused with the Hamlyn one") and if this Return Of The Living Dead seems to have a little more meat on its bones than the earlier Return Of The Living Dead - just - it's such a page-turner that it shouldn't take much longer to belt through.

Its fourteen years on from the incident which saw the dead rising from their graves in Pittsburg and we now know the plague was caused by a chemical spillage. Thanks to the combined efforts of Brit defectors Burgess and Maclean plus American red-under-the-bed Raymond Aston, a consignment of 24 metal drums containing victims of the 2.4.5. Trioxin gas have been hidden in the basement of the Uneeda Medical Supplies Warehouse in Louisville. It's such an international embarrassment that the US army have hushed up the disappearance and hoped for the best.

After discovering the bloated remains of his friend Sunshine following his fatal heroin overdose, 22-year old Freddy Travis realises that perhaps he's not quite so eager to "live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse" after all. Smartening himself up some, he lands a job as a shipping clerk at Uneeda Medical Supplies and worries about how his REALLY IRRITATING 'punker' mates will react to him now he's become a square. It being the night before Thanksgiving, said "zany" punkers - Meat, Scuz, Suicide, Legs, Casey the nympho, Chuck and sensible Tina Vitali (Freddy's steady) - decide it would be "really rad!" to celebrate with a grave-defiling orgy in the Resurrection Cemetery next to the warehouse.

Freddy allows his supervisor, a know-it-all Italian bigot named Frank Nello, to talk him into staying on late while he shows him the ropes. Unfortunately, while meddling around in the cellar, Nello upsets one of the contaminated drums. A noxious yellow gas escapes, rendering he and Freddy unconscious while animating a shriveled cadaver and a dog split clean down its middle. They have to get rid of the squirming dead things or Frank might lose his pension so they hack 'em, bag 'em and deliver 'em to their boss's poker buddy, Ernie Kaltenbrunner the embalmer, who has a crematorium on his premises. So, the contaminated corpses are burned undead, the smoke rises up the chimney and the ashes are dispersed in a heavy downpour.

Meanwhile in the cemetery, Legs is performing a striptease on a tombstone while her pals drink and sway to new wave on the ghetto blaster. The more exhibitionist members of the scooby gang get down to some cemetery sex but - ouch! - that rain sure stings the skin! And whats with all that creaking and groaning coming from the graves?

With the exceptions of Freddy, Tina and Meat, the plastic punks are such an unsympathetic bunch that when they confront their first "chemical mummy" you hope it will take out most of them. With seventy pages to go the body-count is still relatively small so maybe Russo is pacing us for some lingering horrible cannibal deaths. As Frank Nello warns even before he's fractured the deadly canister: "Don't be squeamish, kid. It doesn't pay off around here."!

[dem]

Freddy and Frank have both turned a fetchingly putrid colour and Ernie Kaltenbrunner is concerned enough to call in the paramedics who confirm that, either there is something wrong with their stethoscopes or the pair are technically dead. Hundreds of rotting stiffs are now up and out of their graves and the ambulance guys are overpowered before they can get their two sick guys aboard. The punker gang ain't doing much better; Suicide's had his brain devoured and Legs got et. No word on nympho girl: either i missed what happened or Russo's forgotten she exists. The surviving youngsters burst into the crematorium to join Ernie, Burt Wilson (super-grouchy warehouse manager), and the two puking patients for a last stand versus the dead people who ain't dead in the conventional sense. They'll also have to keep an eye on Freddy, Frank and the mangled corpses of the couple Ernie was busy beautifying for burial before the 2.4.5. Trioxin hit the fan.

Not since Death Tour have i been so thoroughly turned off by a novel's opening pages, but this is actually pretty good sick fun with a few decent jokey bits thrown in with the gore. come to think of it, this should have been the Hamlyn novel and the Hamlyn should've been the Arrow.

one last heave should do it!

[dem]

All finished! If it's not quite Zombie Apocalypse, then its certainly a more exciting novel than i'd have given it credit for after the opening chapters, was even rooting for at least three of the characters to pull through toward the end.

i've done John Russo an injustice. He didn't forget about Casey after all, just had her split from the others with Chuck, a character so anonymous you wonder how he outlasted Legs and Scuz (who at least has - or rather had - a green mohawk to set him apart from the other dummies). Back at the crematorium, the mutilated car-crash victims, Morton and Helen Dowden, have returned to life in hungry and surprisingly chatty mood. Helen is the happier of the pair, having recently feasted on lovely juicy fresh brains. Before they send her up the chimney, Helen reveals why the zombies are gourmets of grey matter - apparently, they're the only thing that will take away the pain of decomposing! Freddy Travis and Fat Frank are no longer merely technically dead but mad, hungry undead and - touching moment - young Freddy's last gift to his girlfriend is to tell her to run because he can no longer prevent himself from biting into her skull!

Russo bends Romero's rules in that a bullet to the brain has no effect on the ghouls and even if you slice and dice 'em, the severed body parts carry on squirming around regardless. In short, they're indestructible so when the US army solve the crisis by deploying EXTREME URBAN SANCTION (bye bye, Kentucky) they're only making things worse in the long run, leaving Burgess, Maclean and Aston with plenty to chortle about over their vodkas.

[kooshmeister]

I own both of these. Interesting they'd get the same author to write two totally different books with the same title. Russo's explanation of where the first zombie (the "chemical mummy") went between Frank and Freddy opening the drum and Tina coming downstairs (something left unexplained in the movie) is an odd one, I have to say.

A lot of fans of the movie rather childishly disregard anything the novelization has to say, for some reason (for instance the surnames Russo gives Tina, Frank and Freddy are something they peevishly bite their thumbs at). The Burgess, Maclean and Aston characters are often cited as a huge intrusion and indeed when someone first mentioned them I imagined Russo wrote those three into the main storyline somehow. I was surprised when their two scenes ended up amounting to almost nothing.

All told it is a pretty decent novelization so I don't get why people hate it so much.

[kooshmeister]

(Covering just the non-movie version.)



Sue Ellen Miller and her sisters Ann and Karen are being driven by their father, Bert, to a funeral they really don't want to attend. The Millers are an exceedingly dysfunctional family. Although the daughters are relatively well-adjusted, dad Bert is a religious zealot. Every other thing is a sin to him. Sue Ellen is rebellious, dating a motorcycle punk named Billy, and Karen has gone and gotten herself pregnant. Bert, in addition to being extremely religious (or perhaps because of it) is a real jerk who considers them sluts. Ann is the only one of his children he likes at all.

So whose funeral are these hap-hap-happy people going to, anyway? Why it's the nine year old daughter of their neighbor Henry Dorsey, who recently died of rheumatic fever. Charming. But this isn't the reason why the sisters don't want to attend.

Presiding of the funeral is the radical Reverend Michaels, who has a rather unusual, some might say shocking, approach to funerary proceedings. After delivering a eulogy, he turns things over to the dead girl's father, and Henry Dorsey promptly uses a mallet to drive a metal spike into the head of the dead little girl in the casket. Sue Ellen and her sisters are horrified.

We're in rural Pennsylvania, and it's several years after an inexplicable incident wherein the bodies of the recently dead came to life and cannibalized the living. The undead uprising was successfully put down, but the locals have lived in constant fear that it could one day happen again. So they started spiking the brains of everyone who died or anything, lest they arise as a zombie. But even with the occasional slipup and overlooked corpse, it hasn't happened again in years, and the authorities, chief among them Sheriff Conan McClellan, don't believe it will happen again. They think spiking the brains has become unnecessary; a needless desecration of the dead. And much to Reverend Michaels' annoyance, this has become the popular way of thinking around town. His congregation is the only one who still spikes the brains of their dead at funeral services, and because it's super illegal, it has to be done secretly.

As the Dorsey girl's funeral is winding down, a local comes running in to report a bus crash outside. The mourners run over to see what, if anything, they can do. It was a particularly violent crash, claiming the lives of everyone on board. A suddenly worried Michaels orders the entire congregation to start gathering up and accounting for all the dead accident victims. And then to begin spiking their skulls. Sue Ellen and her sisters don't want to participate, but their enraged father forces them to, even the heavily pregnant Karen. Much as they hurry, though, they only manage to spike thirteen of the thirty or so bodies before Sheriff McClellan arrives with rookie cop Deputy Greene, and, fearing arrest, they run away, leaving most of the bodies untouched.

McClellan realizes who was behind it and why, and is angry. It just can't happen again, damn it!, he insists. Sickened by the loss of life in the crash and by the actions of Reverend Michaels' congregation, he elects to accompany Greene to a dive to get drunk after ensuring that all the bodies are taken to the county morgue. He'll worry about what to do with Michaels and his followers later. Meanwhile, the Miller family returns home, where Bert, frantic because they failed to spike so many of the bodies, begins boarding the house up, and, of course, forces his three very upset daughters to help him.

As he and Greene are leaving the bar, McClellan happens upon two men trying to rape a woman. Guns come out. Shots get fired. In the aftermath, the two rapists are dead, but so are Deputy Greene and the victim. More bodies to send to the morgue, a very tired and cynical McClellan realizes. He goes home and turns things over to mortician O'Neil.

Basically, McClellan is an idiot. The man means well, but his insistence on everyone continuing on like normal as if the dead hadn’t risen from the grave to eat the living a few years back, and his fervent insistence that “It can’t happen again!” shows us a shaken man in deep denial of cold hard reality, and said denial ends up costing humanity big time. Needless to say, he’s soon eating his words. At the morgue, the bodies of Greene, the murdered woman, the two rapists and all the bus crash victims who weren't spiked all rise from the dead. After using surgical instruments to slice and hack O'Neil to death, they wander off in search of one thing: food.

At the Miller house, it seems the spirit was willing but the body wasn't in the case of Bert, who falls asleep before he finishes boarding the place up. Sue Ellen tells her sisters she's had it with their asshole dad and packs her things, intending to leave and never return. Sneaking past where Bert is snoozing in his armchair, she promptly departs to go and meet up with boyfriend Billy, leaving the door open. A zombie wanders in a little while later while Bert is still asleep, and, well, you can probably guess what happens to Bert. Ann and Karen come downstairs later to find the front door open and their father's corpse sitting in his chair, partially eaten. There's no sign of his killer, although there are a load of other zombies gathering outside.

The house is surrounded...