How did you happen upon the project of writing Partially Devoured in the way that you did? You were in between projects, and engaging with Night of the Living Dead as you were doing became this therapeutic process. You’re a living example of what we’re talking about, right? On what page were you, like, “You know what, I’m going to see this through?”
It was probably somewhere in the opening credits sequence… I don’t have the book in front of me, but those opening credits probably take up 30 pages of the book. I think that, once I saw how much I had to say about so little, I was like, “Wow, I’ve exceeded what I thought I had to say about this movie already,” and the part of me that loves the challenge came out and was like, “I wonder how long I could go with this. When will I run out of things to say?” And I definitely have not, yet. I have this document of what I’d like to put into a second edition, and it grows by the day. I keep learning new things about it. I’ll never be finished with it.
You must have watched so many versions of Living Dead this and Living Dead that. You, of course, picked up the mantle yourself with The Living Dead, which you completed for Romero after his passing. I imagine you could write five books about these movies and about Romero.
I’m gonna make myself not. Had I known how immensely complicated the book would become, I’m sure I would have never started. Looking at Partially Devoured now, it almost seems like an impossible thing to write. How can you go in that many directions all the time while holding it all together? I’m not gonna do anything like that again, I don’t think; in retrospect, it was just a mad thing to try to do. But it was the most fun thing I’ve ever done, too. I never, ever got sick of it. And I could have written it forever, and the editor basically had to tell me, “You need to stop working on it now, because we need to send it to the printer.” I could have happily worked on this forever.
