The Walking Dead, Volume 17: Something to Fear by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2012)

I've finally caught up with the end (so far) of the Walking Dead series with The Walking Dead, Volume 17: Something to Fear by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2012) [thanks, Dan!]. Luckily after the disappointment of Volume 16, the series comes back to violent life in this most recent addition. The Saviors are more than just a hypothetical target in this volume as they strike out against Rick and his community multiple times, even after being beaten back by Andrea's sharp-shooting. They prove that they have nothing to lose and the unexpected violence and death of beloved characters that we have grown to love over the past 17 volumes is in high form here. Great twist ending and none of the hacky dialogue of the last volume. Now, write another!

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson (2003)

People had been telling me that I would love The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson (2003) for years, but a copy never came into my grasp until the lovely Dr. M bought me my very own copy for my birthday. Thanks, dude!

The Devil in the White City tells the parallel stories of Daniel Burnham, a prominent Chicago architect, and his quest to create a successful World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 (one that would even top the Paris World's Fair that unveiled the Eiffel Tower a few years before), and Herman Webster Mudgett (aka Dr. H. H. Holmes), a charming and successful psychopathic serial killer who preyed, among others, on the single women who came to enjoy Burnham's fair.

While these two men and their dedication to their very different passions is fascinating, the best part for me are the two non-human characters that lean over everything, the city of Chicago and the fair itself. The fair introduced widespread use of electric light, the Midway, the Ferris wheel, a resurgence in classical architecture, the "there's a place in France where the naked ladies dance" tune, and tons more. And Chicago: the most American of all American cities, trying to prove it's own worth against the diamond of New York City by hosting a gigantic fair that seems to be doomed to failure almost from the start.

Larson's novelistic writing style makes this the perfect history book for people who don't like history, but his extensive and diligent research, documented in pages and pages of footnotes, will make archivists and historians happy as well. Last year, my good friend Corie lent me Larson's most recent book, In the Garden of the Beasts, and I liked that one quite a bit, but I liked this one even more. Where Larson's narrative lost steam a bit towards the end of the more recent book, here the parallel stories keep the pace moving steadily all the way through.

People, you were right: I did love this book!

The Walking Dead, Volume 16: A Larger World by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2012)

In The Walking Dead, Volume 16: A Larger World by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2012) Carl is doing better and a relative peace has come to the Alexandria Safe-Zone, but everyone can see that they are running out of food and pickings in the zombie-infested areas around the safe-zone are getting slim. Enter Jesus. Yep: Jesus. Could he be the group's savior? He certainly thinks so. After many suspicions are aired and tests are given a small group goes with him to the Hilltop community, a large group of over 200 survivors who also have their own farm. Cha ching! Jesus wants to open up a trade route between his colony and Rick's group, but a dirty secret is soon revealed: the Hilltop gang gives half of their harvest as a tariff to the mysterious and threatening gang called The Saviors (wait, who was the savior again?). Rick, naturally, decides to throw himself in the middle of everything.

I can see the need to expand the story, and when starting up a new arc there is nothing to be done but a bunch of exposition, but this volume was particularly heavy on the set-up and light on the pay off. In addition, the dialogue was hokier than usual and the drawing often seemed a little sloppy. Here is hoping for a return to form in Volume 17!

The New Central Texas Gardener by Cheryl Hazeltine and Barry Lovelace (1999)

The extremely lovely Joolie lent me her copy of The New Central Texas Gardener by Cheryl Hazeltine and Barry Lovelace (1999) shortly after I started attempting to put plants in the ground and keep them alive. I have a personal history of not being particularly great with plants (although a friend gave me some bulbine almost a year ago and it is so alive that it recently started making happiness flowers), and this book helped make the idea of gardening not quite so scary.

This book is logically organized into the big topics of gardening (climate / soil / trees / shrubs / fruits & veggies / flowers / pests / etc.), and the writing is a comfortable mix of friendly and authoritative. I really appreciated having a book where everything was geared to the hot, dry, rocky, clay-filled challenges of central Texas -- in so many gardening books and magazines half of the suggestions won't really work here since they are designed for the gardening paradise to our north.

The only thing I could have asked for would be more pictures, because who wouldn't want even more lovely pictures of lovely plants, but the combination of descriptions, line drawings, and some selected color plates do an adequate job of illustrating the plants and techniques that the authors discuss. Definitely a solid reference book for those attempting to become what the title suggests.

The Walking Dead, Volume 15: We Find Ourselves by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2011)

In The Walking Dead, Volume 15: We Find Ourselves by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2011) we get a breather after the hectically awesome events of Volume 14. Rick is nursing his son out of a coma, coordinating the reinforcement of their village, and taking over leadership of the community. And the community is adjusting to the big changes that Rick and his group have brought from the outside. Ordinarily the "treading water" volumes like this one haven't entirely done it for me, but in this case it seemed like it the characters (and readers) earned it, and while zombies weren't flying out on every page, the tension and pacing were still maintained.

"...And Ladies of the Club" by Helen Hooven Santmyer (1982)

"Astonishing how attached one can become to a group of essentially incompatible women." (p. 625)

My Aunt Charlotte lent me her copy of "...And Ladies of the Club" by Helen Hooven Santmyer (1982) last fall and I started reading it a little after Christmas. At 1176 pages, Santmyer gives George R. R. Martin a run for his money in the longest-books-I've-read-lately category, and it took me (a fast reader) a couple months to move through this one. While it was slow going early on, like many epics, this one caught me up in the lives of its characters and now that I've finished reading it, I miss reading about what's going on in Waynesboro, Ohio.

Santmyer's epic novel follows the lives of the citizens of Waynesboro from just after the Civil War in 1868 up into the heart of the Depression in 1932. While the cast of characters is extensive (sometimes, to be honest, a little too extensive to keep track of), the main focus of the book is on Anne Alexander Gordon (the daughter of the old town doctor who marries the new town doctor, John Gordon, recently back from the war), and Sally Cochran Rauch (the daughter of the town banker who marries a German entrepreneur, Ludwig Rauch, who has recently purchased a rope factory in Waynesboro). At the start of the book, both Anne and Sally have just graduated from the Waynesboro Female College, the local high school for girls. By the time the book ends, both women have born children, watched their grandchildren grow up, lost their husbands, and ultimately, died themselves.

Providing a structure to the book and to the lives of the intellectual women of Waynesboro is the Waynesboro ladies literary society, colloquially known as "The Club." Started by the headmistress of the Female College, the club consists of local teachers, seminary professor's wives, minister's wives from the various congregations in town, and well-bred women with the time and means to pursue literary culture. The Club meets every two weeks, at which time a paper is given by one of the members on a topic chosen by the program committee. The number of members is limited by the bylaws, and when a member dies or moves away, the selection of a new member is a hot topic. The one unbreakable rule is that the women can not let politics, gossip, or personal grudges enter into the confines of the Club meeting. Everyone must get along.

For me the book was occasionally slow going, particularly as I plowed through Santmyer's loving but extensive descriptions of the town layout, architectural style of the houses, and the decoration of everyone's drawing rooms, but her talent for developing strong characters and the occasional shake to the plot (affairs! Illness! Unwed mothers! Protestants marrying Catholics!) quickly pick up the pace. As a lover of history, the opportunity to read these close observations of American life from the 1860s through the 1930s was wonderful, and I feel like I have a stronger grasp on the changes in the lives of ordinary women as the decades pass by.

Politics is also a big part of this book, both on the national and local level. Her characters and sympathies are distinctly Republican, initially because of the rift of the Civil War, and later because of their tendency to be pro-capitalists, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. A nod is given to Socialism and the importance of treating the workers well, but in this book all factory owners are benevolent Republicans and unions just aren't necessary. Also, while Santmyer's detailed knowledge of local Ohio Republican politics was impressive, it occasionally slowed the narrative down, for this reader at least.

Santmyer herself grew up in a town much like the fictional Waynesboro. She was born in 1895, published a couple of books in the 1920s, and then spent 50 years working on this epic novel. It was published in 1982 when she was 87 and didn't sell that well until it was selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club book in 1984 and quickly went on to be a bestseller, making Santmyer the oldest best selling author at the time.

While this book is quite an investment of time, its strength is in its length and if you have a little patience, it really pays off.

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.]

The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett (1974)

I have gushed about how much I like Leigh Brackett before, so I won't go over all her awesome qualities again except to say that she never disappoints. When I saw this copy of Brackett's The Ginger Star (1974) at a second-hand store in Omaha earlier this year, I grabbed it (along with a ton of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books) right away.

Eric John Stark was born in a mining colony on Mercury. When his parents and the rest of the humans died in an accident, he was taken in and raised by the native inhabitants of the planet. Later more humans came and killed all the "savage beasts" and took Stark as a curiosity. He was caged and humiliated until being rescued and taught English and human ways by Simon Ashton. Now Ashton, a representative of the interplanetary alliance, has disappeared on a little-known planet called Skaith and Stark will do whatever it takes to find him.

Skaith is an ancient and dying planet. Many thousands of years ago it had a vibrant artistic and scientific culture. Then planetary climate changes forced people to abandon the northern cities and resettle in the South. Much of their culture was lost in the struggle for survival and over the centuries pockets of people evolved into very different beings with very different ways of life. Over it all sit the Lords Protector -- unseen and ever present -- represented throughout the planet by their Wandsmen, wizards who maintain order and punish wrongdoing. Most of the planet scrapes by to support the lifestyle of the Wandsmen and the Farers, children of the Wandsmen who never work and only seek out pleasure in sex and drugs. But the sun that Skaith orbits is dying and the planet is gradually becoming more and more uninhabitable. A group of Iranese reach out to the interplanetary alliance and ask to be transported off the planet and resettled elsewhere. This threatens to destroy the world of the Wandsmen and the Farers and they fight back against Ashton and Stark.

Brackett is like a combination of Burroughs and Bradbury -- this is inventive, classic science fiction with an exciting action/adventure bent. As Stark traverses the planet looking for Ashton, we touch on the various inhabitants -- mer-people who had their genes altered centuries ago so they could survive the planetary changes by living under the ocean, people who join together in hypnotized religious pods before killing themselves as a group, Northern miners who harvest metal from long-abandoned ancient cities, and many more. Brackett gives each character a full description and a solid purpose but doesn't dwell on any one group, sticking instead with Stark, the ultimate instinctual outsider, as he works through his single-purposed quest.

This is the first book in a trilogy, and I liked it so much that I've already bought the other two. If you come across anything by Brackett at the used bookstore, pick it up right away -- you will not be disappointed.

***
P.S. I'm working on a theory that George R.R. Martin read and liked these Skaith novels because there are so many parallels with the Game of Thrones: a hero named Stark, a modern world reacting to an ancient and partially-forgotten past, a North/South divide, tiny mystical people called the Children who live in the far north, freaky giant wolves, an abundant use of the word Southron -- definitely something to think about!

The Walking Dead, Volume 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

This volume maintains the tight pacing and close observation of characters that we've had since leaving the prison. At this point, we are so deep in a morass of complicated human failure and moral conundrums that it almost doesn't matter that there are herds of zombies out there just waiting to eat our brains. If you put those herds up against fratricide, the death penalty for children, and very very talkative cannibals, it is hard to say which way of life is really the more rewarding. This volume also features the death of one of my favorite characters, but it was done with such care that I almost don't mind at all.

Gathering of Waters by Bernice McFadden (2012)

I got this copy of Gathering of Waters by Bernice McFadden (2012) through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program early in 2012 and I'm sad it took me so long to read it. Luckily, it got its chance when the book I'd just started was way too big to take with me in my carry-on bag on a recent plane trip, and Gathering of Waters was just the right size. I started the book at 4:30 in the morning at the Austin airport and finished it at two in the afternoon in the plane on the way to my final destination.

Gathering of Waters centers on the infamous 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi by two white men after they say he whistled a white woman at the grocery. Instead of being weighed down by the heavy history of her centerpoint, McFadden's novel creates a structure that is epic and small, spiritual and humorous, and that acknowledges the evil that exists in humanity while resolutely turning away from it.

The book starts in the early 1900s where a young girl in Oklahoma named Doll is possessed by the spirit of a murdered prostitute. Her mother unsuccessfully tries to exorcise the spirit and gives her daughter to the local pastor to raise as part of his family. Things are fine for several years, but when the spirit awakens in Doll, she seduces the pastor, breaks up the home, and the new family ends up moving to Money, Mississippi. We then follow Doll, her daughter Hemmingway, and her husband and son (along with the parallel story of a white family in the same town whose fate is intertwined with Doll's) through a rocky life leading up to the deadly flood of 1927. Eventually we make it to the 1950s where Hemmingway's daughter, Tass, has a crush on Emmett Till, the outspoken boy from Chicago who is in Mississippi visiting his uncle. And we even move further along to the present day as Tass marries, has a family, and ages and the spirit of Emmett finds her again.

This isn't a book that I feel I can do justice with a simple plot description since there is so much more to it than what happens. McFadden's writing style is the perfect mix of plain and poetic, and the easy incorporation of spiritual and magical elements into everyday life is reminiscent of Toni Morrison in all the best ways. I really liked this one.

The Walking Dead, Volume 10: What We Become by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2009)

As the journey to Washington, D.C. begins in The Walking Dead, Volume 10: What We Become by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2009), Rick, who has been doubting his ability to lead, butts heads big time with Abraham, the ultimate alpha-male. And somehow, in the course of this conflict, Rick starts making good decisions and the two men come clean about how broken their strength has made them. I am very into this move away from the character-heavy prison into a stripped down, more focused look at individual personalities in a moving group. Rick and his son Carl (and their relationship) are some super interesting characters. Let's do more of this in Volume 11!

[Also, I may be wrong, but I think the "scientist" in the group is full of shit. Still, I'm glad they have a purpose, even if it seems far-fetched.]

The Modigliani Scandal by Ken Follett (1976)

I got this copy of The Modigliani Scandal by Ken Follett (1976) from the free bin at my library, and I'd say it was worth just about that much.

The story focuses on a group of people who have all been put on the trail of a lost Modigliani painting. Our first protagonist, Dee Sleign, is looking for a topic for her thesis while she is vacationing in France with her rich older boyfriend. Her topic of interest is drug use and art. She goes to talk to an old man who used to know all the painters, and he clues her in to the surviving painting, although he doesn't really know where it is now and can only provide the vague clue of the name of a town in Italy. The thing that makes this particular painting even more exciting to the art world is that Modigliani painted it while he was high! On hashish!

Dee is so excited about this that she sends her uncle, the owner of an art gallery, a postcard with one sentence about her possible find. He gets so excited that he naturally puts a private detective on the case to get the painting before his niece does. Then, after finding another clue, Dee sends a postcard to her friend Samantha Winacre, a popular actress. She should really stop communicating through impulsive postcards. Julian Black, a failed artist and failing gallery owner who is emasculated by his wife and her family money, sees the postcard, and goes to Italy to try and get the painting for his gallery. Plus art forgery! Sex! Drugs! Sex! Money! Europe! Art!

Follett makes the mystery of the painting secondary to the machinations of all these shallow and unlikable characters who dance around each other in predictable and uninteresting ways. His commentary on the art world is very heavy-handed, and the sex and drugs, as well as the way the women are written, really date the book. This gave me a definite Jacqueline Susann feeling, but with all the fun and tawdriness taken out.

This is the only novel by Follett that I've read, and it was one of his first. He turned into a bestselling writer of thrillers, so this obviously isn't the one to judge him on. Follett himself says as much in the preface to this edition and on his website (which you should go to just to see the author picture in the banner).

The Walking Dead, Volume 9: Here We Remain by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

In The Walking Dead, Volume 9: Here We Remain by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010), the bloodbath of Volume 8 really pays off. After their escape from the fighting at the prison, Rick and his son Carl spend an unusually long time as the only characters in the comic. This section of the book, with Rick getting sick and Carl coming into his own, has been one of my favorite parts of the series so far, and the heartbreaking surprise of the dead telephone topped it off perfectly. Eventually they rejoin some of our old friends, but the character list has been greatly reduced from the community at the prison. The arrival at the end of the book of three new characters with an intriguingly hard-to-believe proposition points to the possibility of some interesting doings a'transpiring in Volume 10.

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (2011)

The always amazing J.Lowe kindly loaned me A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (2011), the fifth (and last published) book in the Song of Ice and Fire series and even though it took me a while to attack this monster of a novel, I'm so glad he did.

You might remember that in the fourth book, Martin cut his cast of characters in half and only focused on part of the world of the novel. This fifth book picks up what the other half of our characters were doing and runs concurrently to the fourth book for the first two thirds or so of the novel and then brings everything together and moves into the future. Since Martin added several new important characters this time around and only killed off (or did he?) a few of our old buddies, he is going to have quite the menagerie to deal with in book six.

Like many others, I enjoyed this book more than the one before (although that one had its moments) not the least because my favorite character, Tyrion, is back in the spotlight in this volume. I can't get enough of that guy. And, without busting out any spoilers, I think that is about as far as I can get with this review. [This series and the Walking Dead comics are really stretching my ability to talk about something without talking about it in detail...]

Now that I'm caught up with Martin, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with myself while I wait for the 6th book to be release. Watch the TV series, I guess?

The Walking Dead, Volume 8: Made to Suffer by Robert Kirkman, Charlies Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

The promise of rough chuckles for Volume 8 after the calm of Volume 7 was no joke: in The Walking Dead, Volume 8: Made to Suffer by Robert Kirkman, Charlies Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010) things get pretty real pretty fast. The Governor, the most uncomplicatedly evil creation in the entire book, has set his eyes (well, eye) on our heroes who are trying to build a community behind the safety of their prison walls. That community is blasted apart quickly, although the group is much more of a match for The Governor and his crew of duped townlings than they expected. Heroes die. Attackers die. A bunch of zombies die. In fact, only a handful of our named characters appear to survive to walk the pages of Volume 9. I get the feeling that Kirkman had played out the prison scenario and needed to inject some excitement into his narrative, so he went all Game of Thrones, killed off some unexpectedly major characters, and waited to see what would happen next. And it got my attention, I'm definitely ready to follow him into the next volume.

Householder's Survival Manual: How to Take Care of Everything in Your Home, edited by Nancy Shuker (1999)

I bought this copy of the Reader's Digest Householder's Survival Manual: How to Take Care of Everything in Your Home, edited by Nancy Shuker (1999) at Half Price Books as an impulse buy shortly after we bought our new house. There are a few drawbacks: since it was written in 1999, it is pretty dated (particularly the section on buying electronics and anything that mentions computers); it is geared towards a Reader's Digest audience that I am not a part of (old people?); and the writing style is often clunky and choppy (and sometimes just odd: "The choices available in home flooring today are wide and wonderful.") Still, I am a huge pushover for helpful hints and basic reference, and this book covers everything from electricity and plumbing to stain removal and major appliance selection. Much of the information here can be found with a quick internet search, but when you want a simple explanation it is often more satisfying to consult an index. At least for me! I think I'll hang on to this one until a better general house repair reference book comes along...

The Walking Dead, Volume 7: The Calm Before by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

As you might guess from the title of The Walking Dead, Volume 7: The Calm Before by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010), things are relatively calm in this volume and look to get rather hairy in volume 8. At the beginning of the volume, everyone is reunited at the prison and Lori is ready to give birth to her baby any day. Luckily they brought a woman with some medical training back from Woodbury, and she gets to setting up the prison infirmary as a birthing center. To make things even more calm and happy, the crops are coming in, they get a bunch of food from an abandoned Walmart (not without some trouble, though), and Glen and Maggie are married by Maggie's father in the prison cafeteria. All so happy! And even though some rough things come (zombie attack, amputation, suicide by zombie), we are reminded of how calm things are by the characters constantly remarking on how nice things have been lately. It is no surprise that after all this niceness and treading of water, a big bucket of evil shows up on their doorstep at the end of the volume. To be continued....