Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World

The New York Times bestselling author of Whalefall and Angel Down dives into a horror movie classic to examine his favorite film's importance to our history, culture, and psychology--a perfect blend of research and memoir for fans of the movie, the genre, and beyond.

"A stroke of genius! This is the definitive love letter to the film, written with such meticulous passion and demented glee that you feel yourself standing on the set during the shoot." -- Greg Nicotero 

Daniel Kraus first saw George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead when he was five years old. Through watching it approximately three hundred times since, Kraus discovered the many ways the film is tied to his childhood trauma and how its influence has carried into his adulthood. He couldn't help but wonder: Are there other admirers of the film out there who feel the same?

Partially Devoured uses a frame-by-frame deep dive into Night of the Living Dead to produce a kaleidoscopic cultural investigation of the film's importance and to examine the author's early life of rural isolation and local violence.

Careening from film analysis to rabbit-hole tangents, Partially Devoured will take readers from screaming laughter to the depths of grief, all while illustrating how a beloved genre film has woven itself into so many facets of our lives.

DANIEL KRAUS is a New York Times bestselling writer of novels, TV, and film. His latest novel, Angel Down, was a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2025. His novel Whalefall won the Alex Award, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, and was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, The New York Times, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and more. With Guillermo del Toro, he cowrote The Shape of Water, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film.