George Romero Adapting Zombie Novel 'The Zombie Autopsies'

The king of the zombies, George Romero, is at it again but there will be no night, dawn, day, land, diary or survival for the dead this time. This time, he's cutting them up. Romero is currently writing an adaptation of a 2011 book The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse by Steven C. Schlozman which is about shocking revelations when a group of scientists perform autopsies on zombies following a zombie apocalypse.

Read more about that, as well as Romero's thoughts on The Walking Dead and more, after the break.

io9 spoke to Romero recently and got the information out of him. Here's what he said about adapting The Zombie Autopsies:

This is Steve's story, not mine. It's more like The Andromeda Strain. It's very tense and very medically correct. This guy's a doctor, it's all about being medically correct. I think about it like the first Hammer Frankenstein film, which was all about very graphic scenes of brains floating in blood and things like that. I want it to be perfectly accurate, almost shockingly so.

Romero also gets into a few more details as to why he chose this zombie story to adapt but they pretty much ruin the surprise of the book. Head there to read them if you want. Here's the non-spoiler Publisher's Weekly review from Amazon:

Presented as the journal kept by a neuroscientist investigating the medical causes of zombiism, Schlozman's clever debut shows that there's still life left in the overworked horror theme of the living dead. Dr. Stanley Blum is already infected (as is two-thirds of humankind) with ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome (ANSD)—the virus that makes flesh-eating zombies lurch and lunch—when he decamps to Bassas da India, an island overseen by the U.N., to vivisect captive zombies in the hope of isolating the pathogen before he succumbs to it. Schlozman makes the science both accessible and plausible. In lieu of a meaty plot, he provides a grim vision of zombie apocalypse and a surprise explanation for the virus's origin. Printed as a handwritten diary and illustrated in gory glory with clinical drawings by Andrea Sparacio, this book is sure to be scarfed up by ravenous zombiephiles.

Sounds like something Romero can really sink his teeth into, pun intended. One thing he didn't want to do that with was The Walking Dead, the hit AMC zombie show that just started its second season. Romero revealed he was asked to direct a few episodes and while he's a fan of the comic, didn't feel a connection to it:

I love the books, I haven't seen any of the episodes. Listen I love Frank [Darabont], I know he's done a good job. I love the books, I never watched any of the episodes because... my zombies are sort of my own. I didn't want to be part of it. Producers called and said, "do you want to direct some of these," and I said no. Because I just didn't think it was me. I've been waiting to see the whole first season, which I missed because I've been traveling. I've been waiting to look at it, but I haven't seen any of it.

There's much more in the io9 piece, just beware of Zombie Autopsy spoilers. They're clearly marked though.

Has anyone read this book? Do you think it'll be a good fit for Romero?