The Walking Dead, Volume 14: No Way Out by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2011)

Oh hell yes. The Walking Dead, Volume 14: No Way Out by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2011) is the one I'd been waiting for. That whole "humans are the real monsters" thing was good for awhile, but it was about time that Kirkman got back to dancing with the ones what brung us to this spectacularly fucked up hoe down: THE ZOMBIES! And there are zombies a-plenty here when the Alexandria Safe-Zone is besieged by a zombie herd and the walls begin to fail. And besides all the zombie heads being axed, shot, and macheteed, there is plenty of time for all that juicy character development and moral quandries that we have come to love. Let's keep this up!

Horror Films of the 1990s by John Kenneth Muir (2011)

Oh, hi. Wonder where I've been? Mostly I've been simultaneously reading two gigantic books, and Horror Films of the 1990s by John Kenneth Muir (2011) is the one that I just finished! It may seem weird to read a reference book on 1990s horror movies cover-to-cover, but I got a copy through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I couldn't in good faith write a review of it without reading the whole thing.

The 1990s are generally known as being a rather weak period for horror movies, and while there are plenty of one star reviews in Muir's book (and, actually, those are pretty entertaining to read), there are a good crop of four star movies in there as well. It helps that Muir casts his net wide -- the usual suspects like Scream or The Blair Witch Project and standard series like Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th, and Child's Play are joined by movies like Lost Highway, Silence of the Lambs, Jurassic Park, and Eyes Wide Shut. I like that Muir has a broad definition of horror, and I also like that he watched and reviewed all of these hundreds of movies by himself. He has also written compendiums on horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s, so he presumably knew what he was getting into with this one.

While the book cover couldn't look more like a high school sociology textbook, the contents are nicely organized and well illustrated. Muir starts each year off with a timeline of events and then moves into an alphabetical listing of the films reviewed from that year. Each movie includes complete cast and crew information, and many movies also include quotes from external reviews (both contemporary and retrospective), some of which contradict Muir and each other. Enveloping all this detailed information is a well-written introductory essay on the 1990s and how current events influenced the horror movies of the decade, and some intriguing appendices, including common themes from the 1990s (the police procedural, the interloper, the "meta" horror movie, etc.), movie tag lines, and Muir's personal top ten.

That personal top ten goes a long way to explaining why I liked this book so much -- it is a personal look at a huge number of genre movies. I don't always agree with Muir (I didn't like Scream at all and he loved it), but even when I disagreed with him I was interested to see his reasoning. And he always has reasons!

The book loses steam as you get into the late 1990s -- reviews are shorter and sloppier -- and sometimes Muir's quirks can get a little annoying (he is a little nit-picky about plot details) -- but overall this is a coherent and very readable overview of a huge swath of film history. Definitely recommended for horror movie fans, and since I'm married to this guy, you know that I am one of those!

The Walking Dead, Volume 13: Too Far Gone by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

Ah yes, much as I expected, things are starting to get interesting again in The Walking Dead, Volume 13: Too Far Gone by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010). The Alexandria Safe Zone, a seemingly utopian community planned before the zombie crisis as a solar-powered mini-refuge, being filled as it was with those fallible humans, had some rifts and slime bubbling up under the surface. Naturally, our newly settled band of lovable survivors, particularly Rick, couldn't let things go unremarked (that's what we love about him!) and the big issues of justice, punishment, self-defense, and survival once again rise to the top.

The Walking Dead, Volume 12: Life Among Them by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

Well, I knew it had to happen sometime -- we couldn't just hang out with limited characters out in the open forever, but I'm a little skeptical of where things are going in The Walking Dead, Volume 12: Life Among Them by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010) now that our characters have found a somewhat-utopian community of Alexandria in which to life their "normal" lives. The character count just about quadruples in this volume, and that in itself was a little overwhelming. Of course I know that things are never what they seem, so I'm hoping for some disruptive action in the next volume.

[Also, I was totally right about that dude.]