Bookmonkey vs the Hoard: Post Five - Outcast

One of the titles I've been meaning to get around to the most in the hoard is Robert Kirkman's Outcast. This demonic possession story, written by the fellow who came up with both Incredible and The Walking Dead, has had me intrigued since I first heard about it back in 2014. The fact that a TV adaption began earlier this year just added to my interest, but as I've been on a Marvel kick as of late, I just couldn't seem to find the time.

Having now read the first two collections, A Darkness Surrounds Him, and A Vast and Unending Ruin, I've got to say I'm pretty impressed, and really creeped out. The series follows a young man named Kyle Barnes, who has twice had his life interrupted by demonic possession, first his mother during his childhood, and later his wife.

The series opens with a small family seeing the first occurrence of a possession, and then quickly moves into the troubled life of Kyle Barnes, a man desperately trying to make his way through the world day-by-day, and who seems almost completely disassociated with everyone and everything around him. The story follows Kyle as he joins a local Reverend to help in an exorcism, and then moves into an area of demoic possession fiction I don't think I've every come across before. What if the possession was real, but the exorcism only partly worked?

This series was incredibly immersive and had me pulling for Kyle and desperately trying to understand his new world. An excellent read, and one I hope to continue very soon.

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: Lee Everett

Over the last few weeks I've worked my way through the five episodes that made up the 2012 video game, The Walking Dead.  Unlike pretty much every other zombie game I've ever played, the 2012 game, created by TellTale Games focuses almost entirely on the interactions between people in a world based on Robert Kirkman's comic book series, The Walking Dead.  In the game, you play a character, and this week's Genre Character, named Lee Everett (voiced by Dave Fennoy).

It's tricky to say why I like the character of Lee so much, as the way he acts and reacts in the game was pretty much up to me - rather than focusing on how many zombies you can kill, the game changes the focus to how you (as Lee) deal with a number of other survivors and try to either get along with them, ignore them, or act horrible towards them.

The first person you meet in the game (after the zombies take over) is a young girl named Clementine (voiced by Melissa Huchison), and together the characters travel across Georgia in an attempt to stay alive in a world overrun by the walking dead.

For my first time through the game, I basically looked towards the kid and whatever she seemed to like was the way my character chose to act - it seemed like kind of a strange way to go through the game, but at the same time, I felt pretty good being honest to this kid throughout the horrible events of the game.

If you've never tried a zombie game before, I would highly recommend it, and as very little of the game requires you to move with lightning speed, even newcomers to video games should be able to navigate their way through the game.

Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Seven

Hack/Slash begins with three stories: Euthanized, Girls Gone Dead, and Comic Book Carnage, which all work to set up the overall story of Hack/Slash. Euthanized begins with Cassie Hack accompanying a camp counselor to a remote location where he attempts to murder her, but is killed first. The two page opener immediately lets the reader know that Cassie is quite savvy in terms of horror movie tropes and conventions, as well as clarifying that in Cassie’s world there is a significant difference between Slashers and Killers. The issue goes on to give us Cassie’s backstory and then focuses on the main event, a small town plagued with undead animals and a mysterious killer.

As part of the fun of the series is seeing how a character who is quite aware of how events are “supposed to go” in a horror movie works her way through to finding and dispatching the Slasher herself, some plot elements will be discussed but much of the main storyline will be left intentionally vague. Although Cassie is given an introductory backstory in the first issue, her partner Vlad is simply a left as a friendly monster who works with Cassie, is devoted to her, and seems to be almost an innocent in the world. It isn’t until the fourth story, The Land of Lost Toys, that Vlad is given any background except for a brief mention of the butcher and Cassie initially mistaking him for a Slasher.

The interesting aspects of the three series is that at this point they were all quite episodic, aside from mentions of Slashers from previous issues they could all work as stand alone stories and as Cassie and Vlad travel from location to location for their stories, there was no crossover of any characters past the two leads, with reoccurring flashbacks of Cassie’s mother. For me the standout was Comic Book Carnage as it takes place at a comic book convention, mixes up fictional characters with real world characters (two of the victims in the story are Steve Niles, author of the comic series 30 Days of Night, and Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead). In this story an unknown Slasher is targeting the creative team of a new comic book series which is reimagining a classic (to the Hack/Slash universe) superhero called Wunderkind as he is enraged at how the new creators are adapting his favourite character. What I really loved about the story was the focus on the comic book fan community, a look at how conventions work and the tongue and cheek way in which writer Tim Seeley has killed off a number of other horror comic book writers (to be fair, the Hack/Slash version of Tim Seeley is also killed (off-screen) in an upcoming issue).

IMAGE CREDIT
Hack/Sash Girls Gone Dead Cover Art (2004) http://comicbookrealm.com/cover-scan/900508eab05301380223e751e51aaf6b/xl/devils-due-publishing-hack-slash-girls-gone-dead-issue-1b.jpg

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.

Book Review: The Walking Dead Rise of the Governor

Long time readers of my blog will be pretty familiar with this, but for those of you visiting The Wisdom of Bookmonkey for the first time, I'm a pretty big fan of zombie stories; yup, whether comedic, terrifying, or post-apocalyptic, I have always been a pretty big fan of stories involving the walking dead.

Currently The Walking Dead is both my favourite comic book series and my favourite television series, so when a novel came along focusing on one of the comic-book series biggest villains I had to take a look.

The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor, written by original series creator Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga follows a small group of friends and family just after the initial zombie outbreak and shows us a much darker view of the world normally inhabited by Rick Grimes and crew. The story moved quickly, answered more than a few questions about the main character and even had a couple tie-ins for the fan of the comic book series.

The novel was a lot of fun, and I believe that even if you haven't read the original series or seen the show, it still stands quite well on its own. It was originally conceived as the first in a series of novels focusing on characters from the comics and if that is the case, I am definitely looking forward to more of these in the future.

Things I've Noticed: The More Anticipated the book, the less time to read it

Over the last couple days I've been working on the novel The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. I ordered the book from my local comic book store a few months back and shifted things around so I could read it as soon as I got it added to my collection.

The thing is, it seems that the more I anticipate reading a title, the less time I actually have for reading it. Considering I read more than half a dozen books a month, it always seems that whichever book I look most forward to reading, the more busy my life tends to get.

Case in point, over the last few weeks I read the Starman Omnibus six volume collection by James Robinson (now don't get me wrong, I totally enjoyed that series and strongly recommend it here, but the books sat on my shelf for months - or in some cases years while I waited to own the entire collection), and overall things were going pretty smooth; I was on top of my assignment for my course, things were going good at both home and work and I moved through that series at a pretty good clip (roughly ninety comic issues in about five days).

Since I started this newest book, I've had a massive workload increase (both at my job and at school), people continue to walk up and chat with me every time I crack open the book (and yes, of course I stop reading to chat with people - I passed out of my moody, "Leave me alone I'm READING!!!" phase a few years back), and a pretty terrible snow storm added to a crowded bus ride home mean that I've had no time to read on my commute for the last couple days.

People often talk about a work/life balance, but for me there is a work/life/reading balance that requires extra work, and until I have that balance perfected, I will just have to resign myself to the fact that the books I'm most interested in reading will end up taking me three or four times the amount of time to read that all of my other books do.

Book Review: Marvel Zombies

Having been a huge fan of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead for years now, I thought it was time to check out some of his other material. Rather than start with Invincible (which my BFF Mike says is amazing) or The Astounding Wolf-Man (which sounds pretty cool as well), I started with his five-issue mini series, Marvel Zombies.

First of all - a quick note, although you don't technically need to read it, the back story for the comic starts in Ultimate Fantastic Four 21-23, written by Mark Millar. Basically the story involves zombie versions of the Fantastic Four from another dimension attempting to break into the mainstream Marvel Universe. The are stopped by the regular Fantastic Four and the Zombie universe's version of Magneto (who is not yet a zombie) and permanently close the door on a possible zombie invasion.

Marvel Zombies starts here - with Magneto having a short-lived success on the Zombie-side of the dimensional portal. After that we get a very interesting zombie story - one from the point of view of the infected. We see how the heroes of this universe have already killed almost all of the remaining food in their world and are beginning to starve. Each comic has at least one idea that creeps me out (Spider-man ate his wife and aunt), and those ideas get progressively creepier as the story moves on.

The story was so popular when it came out that a series quickly followed (much of it written by Kirkman), and although I haven't read it, I sure would like to - this was some scary stuff, and if you always wanted to know what would happen if all the Marvel super-heroes were turned into zombies, look no further.

Genre Character of the Week: Rick Grimes

This week I thought I would start looking at some of the many characters I love from genre fiction. As I focused on a personal favourite from SF last week, and as Halloween is a mere three days away, it's time to focus on one of my favourites in horror.

From the horror comic series The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Officer Rick Grimes, represents, to me anyway, one of the better role models when it comes to surviving a zombie apocalypse. Waking up in a hospital in the first issue, Rick is dropped head-first into the horrors that this new zombie-ruled world has in store for him. Over the more than 60 issues of this series (it is still ongoing) Rick continually, although not voluntarily, stands up for his small band of survivors and does everything he can to ensure their survival. This guy is simply a blue-collar every-man who is trying to do the best he can in one of the worst situations in genre fiction.

I find there is a lot about Rick I can relate to; he's married, a parent, likes to be proactive in problem solving - rather than simply running from the zombies he looks for a safe long-term location to live, and his solution makes perfect sense from a zombie-defence point of view. Although I am not a police officer, the main character as protector is easy to relate to as a dad, and the importance of getting people to work together is something that I think is relatable to most people.

In the end, Rick goes through more than I would ever, EVER want to go through. He does things for his family I only hope I could do if the world ever went to hell, but I think that is his greatest appeal, a regular guy who does everything he can to protect the people he loves.