Lenni Reviews: The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury

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I love you guys. No, really, I do. And you better love me, too, for reading this book when I had a feeling it would be just like the first one.

Road to Woodbury suffers from the same problems as Rise of the Governor; uneven writing, cliche zombie tropes, thin characters; the works. Now, if you want to read this book or haven’t read the comics (which really, if you haven’t dafuq you doing here?), there will be spoilers for both in the review because I just can't properly express what bothered me about the book without giving away some details.

I’m serious.

Spoilers here.

Last chance...

Alright, here we go.

This novel follows Lilly Caul as she tries to survive the aftermath of the plague and ends up in Woodbury. At least the title here is accurate; there is a road and Lilly uses it to get to Woodbury and does so WAAAYYY earlier in this book than the Governor became the Governor in the first book. When Lilly gets there, she is instantly aware there is something rotten in Woodbury (bonus points if you get my Shakespeare reference). The Governor is in full on evil fuckwit mode and creepy from word one. How the wimpy asthmatic from the end of Rise of the Governor vanished is never told. But there he is in all his murdery, rape-y, heads-in-fish tank-y glory as if he was plucked from the comic, NOT from the first book.

So, there’s a time lapse. Lenni can be down with that. But not a single character drops a clue the man was anything other than complete evil from the moment he was put in charge. I get the feeling I arrive in Woodbury like this:



And also, he spends exactly two random pages having a sob session over the monster he has become. It was out of place. All of a sudden, he spends two pages out of 288 to lament how he has become a monster like his brother, Philip, in order to survive, despite the fact he hadda kill his brother and thereby Philip didn’t survive. He literally pauses to cry about being a murdering fuckwit then immediately goes back to being a murdering fuckwit. It was completely out of place and I didn’t feel any sympathy for him. I was annoyed and just wanted him to go back to killing things to make it stop.

Lilly despises him from the start (like Michonne does in the show) and wants out. She hatches a plot to kill him, it fails because: zombies. Then inexplicably, the Governor does NOT kill her like he did pretty much anyone else who looked at him funny and she vows she’s gonna kill him one day. You heard me right: The villain who tortured Michonne for biting his ear off, keeps his zombie niece (or "daughter" in the show) as a pet, does a crappy job of chopping Tyreese's head off, and kills people on a whim for the lulz lets Lilly live after she conspired to kill him and failed. Does not compute!

My other problem with this? At no point in the comic does Lilly seem to outright object to anything that happens till she finds out she’s shot a fleeing woman with her infant (Lori and Judith). And I went back to the comics and checked. Twice.

To sum up my issue: the entire book, Lilly despises the Governor and can’t want to kill him yet in the comics, she had no problem rolling up to the prison at his side. And if she was just going along for the ride for the chance to kill him, it STILL doesn’t jive because she spends the entire novel whining about the deaths of innocent people. She’s got a lot of collateral damage on her hands if the whole plot was to somehow kill the Governor in the prison. It doesn't make sense to me how "Lilly" who failed to kill the Governor in the novel and "Lilly" who killed Lori and her baby are the same woman.

I am no perfect writer. I am sure there are cliches, typos, grammar mistakes and dangling plot points in my books but something like this was like a flood light to the eyes. If you're going to transmit your property to another medium and say it's a prequel, not an alternate universe, at least have it make sense.

I didn’t want to throw the book this time but it did give me a headache. On the plus side, it read faster than the first book and the descriptions of zombie mauling and oozing, decayed flesh are enough to make you grimace. But at $24.99, I expect better. No, I DEMAND better. Because the collected comics come in at $14.99 for the volumes, $34.99 for the big books, and $59.99 for the compendiums, there needs to be more bang for my buck. More happens in any of those comics to warrant the prices than in the hardcover novels.

Well, at least it’s over and there won’t be another one.

Aww, shit...