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.