Series: The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman

Posted on March 1, 2013 by MrPopularSentiment

I’ve read sixteen of these things now, so I think I’m ready to comment on the series as a whole.

This graphic novel series is about Rick Grimes – a police officer in a past life, but now simply trying to survive in a world overrun by the walking dead. Early on in the series, he is reunited with his wife and son, as well as a small group of survivors, and they travel around the Atlanta/Washington area trying to find a safe home.

There’s some good character development in the series. It’s not an easy thing to take a reader who feels reasonably safe and secure, and make them believe that someone is, if not justified, at least understandably turning into a monster. Rick’s progression is slow, and – at first – his increasingly unhinged decisions seem justified. And maybe they are in book 16 as well, but it’s sure clear enough that he’s lost that wide-eyed innocence that made him so compelling in the first few books of the series.

The plot is quite interesting. There are many twists and turns, and there’s no holding back on killing off main characters so there’s a real legitimate fear of main characters dying when things get hairy. Taking the survivors through a number of different locales keeps in interesting and allows us to see all the different ways that the people in Kirkman’s world have found to survive. There are some overly convenient bits – such as when the group is separated and then just happen to stumble on each other later on – but it’s easy enough to ignore.

The big issue with the series is the dialogue. It lacks flow, people say painfully artificial things (particularly the monologues, but this happens in conversation too), and the phrasing is very stilted. Some of the errors could be solved easily with an editor, but this seems to have been bypassed. The central theme of “humans are the real monsters” is spelled out over and over again, which is terribly unnecessary given that a) it’s an easy enough theme to convey through subtle means, and b) anyone familiar with the zombie genre is already going to be expecting it since wowzers, can anyone say “overdone”? I’m not really into graphic novels, but given that Kirkman’s only job is to write plot and dialogue, I’d expect him to do the latter much better.

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The Undead and Philosophy edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad

Posted on December 30, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 17 December, 2012

When I reviewed Game of Thrones and Philosophy, I complained that the book was just out to explain philosophical concepts, and it’s tie to the ostensible subject rested solely on using a few names and events for illustrations. In The Undead and Philosophy, on the other hand, the subject matter is much more integrated in the articles – each chapter using the Undead to discuss things like issues of personhood, or the relationship between desires/impulses and civilization.

In some cases, it worked really well and I felt that my consumption of the Undead genre was enriched by the thoughtfulness of the article (such as “Heidegger the Vampire Slayer: The Undead and Fundamental Ontology” by Adam Barrows). Others were just uninteresting. And still others were simply hilarious – such as the article that argued that zombies are giant erections with vagina mouths (“The Undead Martyr: Sex, Death, and Revolution in George Romero’s Zombie Films” by Simon Clark).

I can’t really think of the right audience for this book. I think that anyone with an interest in philosophy will either already be familiar with all of the concepts or will be able to find a much better introduction. Zombie and vampire aficionados may well be enriched by some of the new perspectives, but I don’t think it’s worth the price of the whole book. Maybe this is just one of those books that libraries were made for.

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The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Posted on December 25, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 13 December, 2012

When the widow Mrs Alice Drablow dies, Arthur Kipps is sent to her home – Eel Marsh House – to sort through her papers for anything of legal relevance. But before he even reaches the house, he encounters the woman in black, and everything is changed.

I watched the 1989 film with Adrian Rawlins a few years ago and very much enjoyed it. It’s a psychological horror that focuses more on the creepy atmosphere than showing gross stuff or having things that go “boo!” So when I found out recently that there was a book, I decided that I just had to give it a read!

And I am so glad I did!

The book is everything I loved about the movie, dialed up. Right from the start, the atmosphere is so creepy that I had several moments in my reading when I was too scared to put the book down and get out of bed. Hill uses very subtle things (a noise, a woman just standing at a window, a thick fog, an open door), but weaves them together in a terrifying (and relentless) way.

My main complaint with a lot of horror is that it seems to confused “frightening” with “gross.” This is never more clear than in most of the torture porn/horror flicks that Hollywood keeps churning out. I like to be frightened, I find it thrilling! But I do not like to be grossed out. The Woman in Black is the first horror I’ve seen in a long while – in any medium – that sets grossness aside completely. And that makes me so very very happy.

As all my Facebook and book club friends will attest, I have been absolutely raving about this book. It’s super short – just 150 page in my copy – and a very easy read, so there’s no excuse not to give it a go.

P.S.: The final line (“They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.”) is so absolutely perfect that it deserves it’s own separate mention.

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Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales by Vernon Lee

Posted on December 20, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 4 July, 2012

Hauntings is a collection of short fiction by a somewhat little known late 19th/early 20th century writer. Most of the stories don’t deal with actual hauntings, per se, but rather with weird, possibly supernatural events.

Some of the stories, like “Amour Dure,” pulled off the suspense quite well. Others, like “Dionea,” were weaker. Regardless, they all had interesting ideas behind them.

“Oke of Okehurst” and “A Wicked Voice” worked well as a pair (and kudos to the editor for putting them together) – one centring the story around art and the other around music.

All of the stories showed an impressive depth of knowledge and a brilliant mind, but they lacked “tightness” and narrative skill. It was truly a shame because I found the stories so interesting, but had to struggle through their dryness.

If you’re interested in the time period and want to read something from a more off-the-beaten-track author, I do recommend giving Hauntings a try.

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Best New Zombie Tales, vol. 1 edited by James Roy Daley

Posted on November 30, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 24 November, 2012

Introductions are supposed to either hook the reader or provide additional insight into the work(s) to follow. This one, however, was just an absurd, juvenile fantasy in which Daley defends his choice to put out yet another zombie book to H.P. Lovecraft, while Lovecraft holds his hand in a blender. It adds nothing to the book save for a really poor first impression.

As for the collection itself, the goal is, as Daley puts it, “To put together the best zombie tales ever written. Don’t care what year the story was written. Don’t care who wrote it. Don’t care if the story follows Romero’s un-written rules of what a zombie is supposed to do. Don’t care if it’s offensive, or filled with naughty language. All I care about is High Quality Fiction. Simple.”

To his credit, what Daley lacks as a writer of introductions, he’s made up for in story selection. A few fell flat (such as “Fishing”), but most were quite interesting. For the most part, the writing quality was decent (except for issues like in “Muddy Waters” where a boy rides a moose “like a demented cowboy” on one page, and then “like some demented junior range rider” on the next).

There were also quite a few issues with the editing/proof reading of the stories. Words would be omitted (“I didn’t kill my all [sic] of these people,” writes Gary McMahon, and “He knew him. I could that [sic] by the look on his face…,” writes John L. French). I found the editing sloppy enough to distract me, but only a little, and someone less anal may not even notice.

I did like that Daley didn’t just pick Romero zombies, so there’s quite a variety of imaginings of the animated dead.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this anthology, and it certainly served its purpose as entertainment. But it’s nothing particularly special. Good for a lazy afternoon, anyway.

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The Terror by Dan Simmons

Posted on November 5, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 23 October, 2012

It’s 1847 and the Franklin Expedition’s two ships, the H.M.S. Erebus and the H.M.S. Terror, are trapped in the ice just off the coast of King William Island. The summer thaw never came and, as the men face yet another winter in the ice, scurvy and starvation begin to set in. As if their situation were not already dire, a monstrous beast is lurking out on the ice and picking off the Expedition’s men in horrific and gruesome ways.

The book is huge, over 700 pages in my edition, and the majority of it is fluff. What we know of the Expedition’s fate is horrific enough to have have stood without the inclusion of the supernatural, and been better for being shorter.

The writing style was okay, but did leave a lot to be desired. Simmons apparently struggles with dialogue, so that, for example, Doctor Goodsir describes Captain Fitzjames as speaking “not condescendingly” about twenty times in the space of a two page dialogue.

Crozier is described as having “second sight.” Unfortunately, this is introduced while he’s in a delirium brought by withdrawal from alcohol, well into the story. This was used to cover irrelevant things (like the Fox sisters), as well as some of the future rescue attempts. I realize that Crozier had to have “second sight” for the ending, but the way it was introduced felt far too contrived – shoe-horned onto the character rather than an integrated part of him.

However, despite its flaws, Terror did offer me the opportunity to find out more about the Franklin Expedition, and reading about the real details in a story format helps me remember them. Overall, I’d say that this is a book I’m glad to have read, but that I didn’t very much enjoy the process of reading.

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World War Z by Max Brooks

Posted on July 25, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 14 June, 2012

I’ve been reading a lot of zombie stuff recently, so I picked up World War Z after a YouTuber (I think it was Hank Green?) made a comment about being really freaked out by the book. So, knowing absolutely nothing else about the book, I decided to check it out from the library. The result was that I went on vacation with three books in my bag, two about zombies (Rise of the Governor and World War Z) and one about bunnies (Watership Down, which my dear gentleman friend has decided to read). Only slightly embarrassing.

All zombie stories that I’ve read/watched to date have followed the Rise of the Governor model: Small group of people are hit by the zombie apocalypse, and the story follows their efforts to survive. From the subtitle of WWZ (“An oral history of the zombie war”), I assumed that it would follow the same general format from the perspective of a character narrating her/his survival story from some point in the future.

That’s not what WWZ is about at all.

Rather, WWZ is presented as the “human stories” behind a report written by the United Nations Postwar Commission. These are presented in a collection of first person accounts, written by a wide variety of people from all over the world, offering a global perspective of the zombie apocalypse.

Because each POV character gets only a couple pages, the reader doesn’t have the chance to bond with them. This directs the focus more towards a sense of shared humanity that, in some ways, made the tales even more emotionally powerful.

I really can’t stop raving about WWZ. It was alien yet relatable, entertaining yet thought-provoking, horrifying yet uplifting. This isn’t just an excellent zombie book, it’s an excellent book, period. I ended up buying a copy as soon as I got back from vacation, and I highly recommend that you do the same!

Learn how to survive the zombie apocalypse and support this blog in one fell swoop! Buy World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War from Amazon today!

The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Ray Bonansinga

Posted on July 5, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 11 June, 2012

Rise of the Governor is an add-on to the Walking Dead graphic novel series, chronicling the journey of the eponymous character. If you’ve read the graphic novels (or, shortly I am sure, seen the TV show), you’ll know who the Governor is. If not, he’s the ruthless leader of a small town of survivors, and the antagonist of books #6-8. In the comics, he appears as a fully formed Bad Guy™, so this novel gives some of his backstory and an explanation (such as it is) for how he came to be that way.

Though a different medium from the graphic novels, Rise of the Governor is clearly part of the same series, and shared all the same weaknesses. In my reviews of the series, I’ve often complained about the editing issues, and these are present in the novel as well. Words and phrases are repeated close together in a way that sounds awkward, or a not-quite-right word will be used (a car is rolling down a hill: “The weight of the vehicle is building inertia.”). All problems that could have easily been solved by the use of a good editor.

There were also problems in the way that the narrator related to the characters. Or, rather, in the way the narrator doesn’t relate to the characters. The characters are blue collar guys, and it’s frequently pointed out (derisively) that one had attended college. And yet when a character starts turning into a zombie and begins to move, this is described as being: “like the typical residual nerve twitches that morticians might see now and again.” The killing of zombies is described in very clinical terms (“He hears the THWACK of another axe blade outside the closet, smashing through the membrane of a scalp, into the hard shell of a skull, through the layers of dura, and into the pulpy gray gelatin of an occipital lobe”). Why on earth would a a story about a couple blue collar guys from Georgia be narrated in this kind of way?

My last gripe is with the character exposition, which suffers terribly from what I like to call Dollar Bin Syndrome. The books in the dollar bin of a store have more differences than similarities – some are romances, some are murder mysteries, some are historical fictions, some have female leads, some of male leads… but all share one trait in common: They are universally terrible at introducing new characters. We see this in Rise of the Governor, where every new character is introduced with an emotionally dissociated laundry list of traits (usually physical, although sometimes the “twinkle of the eyes and salt-and-pepper hair” betrays some profound temperamental facet, or whatevs). It reads more like an eHarmony profile than an engaging novel.

But for all that, it did keep me interested and the character development was reasonably well handled. The Governor is a very difficult character to live up to, but I found his backstory to be executed satisfactorily. The twist at the ending was fairly gimmicky, but it fit in with the narrative and it did work.

If you’re into zombie stories / apocalyptic fiction / survivalism, or if you’re a fan of the Walking Dead series, Rise of the Governor definitely wouldn’t be a waste of your time. It’s nothing to write home about, but it’s worth reading.

Want to get this novel for yourself AND support this zombietastic blog at the same time? Buy The Walking Dead: Rise of The Governor from Amazon! Continue reading →

The Walking Dead #5-6: The Best Defense & This Sorrowful Life by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard

Posted on May 25, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 29 March, 2012

In The Best Defense and This Sorrowful Life, we continue with the survivors’ stay in the prison. When Rick sees a helicopter going out just a few miles away, he takes Glenn and Michonne to see if anyone survived the crash. But what they find instead is a whole town of the living, reminding us once again that the greatest danger in a zombie apocalypse isn’t the zombies.

These two issues suffer from most of the same problems as the others, namely the shoddy dialogue. The pacing does seem to have slowed down considerably, and we actually get something resembling an arch. We start off nice and slow with the short term goal of getting the prison’s generator running, which requires leaving the safety of the fence to syphon gas from nearby cars, and then we move into the hope/trepidation over the helicopter. The actual encounter with the living doesn’t begin until quite a ways through The Best Defense.

There are other classic storytelling elements that we haven’t really seen prior to these volumes. Rick is now given a foil, known by his followers as the Governor. He is the Rick that might have been. If you’ve recently finished watching Season 2 of the AMC show, one might say that the Governor is the Rick that Shane wanted him to be.

But these two volumes are incredibly brutal. The series has always been fairly graphic (it is a zombie series, after all), but these volumes have crossed the line between violence as a necessity for survival to violence as sadistic pleasure. It’s necessary to the story and character development, so I’m not saying that it shouldn’t have been included, but D and I both agreed that it didn’t need as much panel time as it got. And oh boy, major trigger warning!

Want to buy the books? You can buy The Best Defense and This Sorrowful Life from Amazon.