Book Review: The Walking Dead: Return to Woodsbury

Jay Bonansinga's latest (and eighth) entry into The Walking Dead novel series, Return to Woodsbury, continues the saga of Lilly Caul, the long-suffering saviour of one of the most unforgettable towns in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic and television series, Woodsbury.

Although there were a number of problems I had with this novel (including the introduction and casual killing of a character for little reason past shock value), I've got to admit that I find Lilly compelling as a protagonist and the work Bonansinga puts in to her drive, her planning, and her grace under pressure keep these books moving along at a nice pace.

Certainly not a good place to start for newcomers to the series or the genre, the book is still a fun read, but I'd say the series largely falls to the law of diminishing returns.

Book Review: The Walking Dead: Invasion

As it's the fifth tie-in novel to Robert Kirkman's comic book series, Jay Bonansinga's The Walking Dead, Invasion continues to follow the character of Lily Caul as she attempts to (spoiler for fans of tie-in novels) rebuild the pieces of the recently destroyed Woodbury during the events of The Walking Dead: Fall of the Governor and The Walking Dead: Descent.

Unfortunately for me, the book brings forth one of the staples of American Southern Horror novels - the evil priest. Now I'm not against a story in which an authority figure abuses his or her power to the point where they need to get what's coming to them, but this specific trope is so common in Southern horror, that I would love to read a novel about a kind-hearted Southern priest who does the decent thing because that's what would be most surprising to me in a horror novel these days.

Overall the story moves at a nice pace, and moves between four separate story lines allowing for a good narrative buildup throughout, the tension is very high, and, ignoring the overused evil-priest stereotype, it was a pretty solid read.

Book Review: The Walking Dead: Fall of the Governor part 2

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that I’m a fan of the Walking Dead franchise; whether in comic, television show, novel or video game form, I find the characters compelling and the storylines fascinating. Taking a quick search on my blog I’ve found at least a dozen posts focusing on various aspects of the franchise, so to read more of my opinions, just search “The Walking Dead” in the little search window on the upper-left-hand corner of my blog and get cracking.

Today I’m going to talk about The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor part 2, by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga, the fourth and final novel they co-wrote about the popular villain character, The Governor, and his town of Woodbury.

First things first, although I’m sure the books could be read on their own without any previous knowledge of either the television series or the comics, but I would strongly recommend reading the comics first. Knowing how the events surrounding Woodbury and The Governor ahead of time made the read (for me), but more tense, as I knew how things were going to turn out, but from an entirely different point of view.

In the main series The Governor is an incredibly charismatic, but deadly person, pretty much from the beginning (I can definitely see why the character was dressed differently in the TV series, as he looks pretty villainous in the comics), but there is very little knowledge given about how he, or the currently existing town of Woodbury came about since the beginning of the undead outbreak. These four novels work to fill in those gaps, to make the characters written off as villains much more three dimensional and in more than a few cases, really tragic.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them for newcomers to the franchise, for fans of the comic there is a lot to offer here, and for fans of the TV series a very different view of how the events of season three and four could have gone down.

Waiting on the Governor

I knew it had a release date of February 17, 2014, so rather than try to push through it at the end of February, I scheduled it for my March horror selection.

The latest book in The Walking Dead, The Fall of the Governor Part II.  I special ordered it from my local comic book store and waited.  Now here I am, March 19 (over a month later), and I'm still living without the book.

Not that I need the book to live - actually I read these and then they get re-gifted to a friend, so it doesn't even get added to my own collection, I just really enjoy reading them.

They take the story I know (based on the comics, rather than the TV series - which I'm also digging!), of the small town of Woodbury, and its leader The Governor, and tells it from another point of view.

On the positive(?) side, my local library still lists the book as "On Order" so at least no one else around here is reading it ahead of me - but as March begins to slip by, I'm becoming more and more sure that this story will end up being my April Horror selection and I'll end up picking something else out to scare me this month.

Genre Character of the Week: Lilly Caul

This week's character is a little tricky.  You see, as a pretty big fan of The Walking Dead,  I've enjoyed the story as both a television and comic book series, and as of late, I've enjoyed the back-story novels written by creator Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga.

Last week I read the second of these two back-story novels, The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury, which features the back-story of Lilly Caul (pictured right), perhaps one of the most infamous characters in the comics - without giving away spoilers, let's just say she sits pretty darn close to The Governor in terms of how much she affected the lives of Rick Grimes and crew.

What I can say about the novel, is that it does a good job of portraying the character in a sympathetic manner, and although I can't say it makes me like the character any more than I did before, I do feel like I understand her better.

Overall, the book is worth the read, and for those of you who like the type of stories that further examine secondary characters in the main story, it is a pretty good example of how to do this type of story correctly.