The Walking Dead Universe

The dead get up, and the interesting problem turns out to be everybody still breathing. This is Robert Kirkman's world in prose — the same ruined American South as the comics, told from the side of it the comics only glimpsed. Philip Blake gets his brother and his daughter out of Atlanta while the roads still work, and by the end of the first book he is calling himself the Governor, and a town called Woodbury is about to learn what that means. Kirkman wrote the novels with Jay Bonansinga. Rise of the Governor, The Road to Woodbury and the two-part Fall of the Governor make one long descent; Descent and Invasion carry Lilly Caul on afterwards, trying to hold a settlement together with the man who broke it dead behind her. Expect siege fiction rather than monster fiction: rationing, walls, the arithmetic of who gets fed, and violence arriving from the living far more often than from the dead. The books assume you know the shape of this world but not this corner of it. Begin with Rise of the Governor and read straight through — it is one story about how an ordinary father becomes the thing everyone else is running from, and it does not blink at any stage of the process.