The Children of the Dead

Concocted from experimental theater, splatter film, Gothic literature, philosophy, religion, and more, Jelinek’s phantasmagorical masterwork is a fierce confrontation with our fraught legacies in the name of the innocent dead".

In a review for the Washington Post, Dustin Illingworth called the novel "a savage reckoning with the Holocaust; an indictment of consumer culture; a compilation of ghastly erotica replete with undead orgies; an erudite display of Joycean wordplay; and a relentlessly bleak portrait of the human capacity for self-deception.

"[7] John Semley wrote in The Nation that "Jelinek’s prose is dense, chock-full of localisms and bits of political history, and riven with that most Germanic form of humor, die Wortspiele — puns, basically."

Of these undead protagonists, the three primary are Gudrun Bichler, Edgar Gstranz and Karin Frenzel; they are incapable of speech, obsessed with sex, and brutal.

In 2019, directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska collaborated on a feature film adaptation, Die Kinder der Toten, in a comedy horror style.