I’m starting to get caught up to or finished with graphic novel serieses, which in a way fills me with trepidation. Now I’ll have to start finding new ones with no idea whether they’ll be good. (There are three in the pipes right now, and a fourth I have solidly in mind but not yet in hand.) The good news is that by the time I get caught up on The Walking Dead, the latest one in January will almost certainly have been released, so I can push out that moment of doom just a slight bit further. The even better news is that my distaste for the previous book‘s apparent retreading of well-covered thematic ground has been assuaged for now.

This Sorrowful Life opens on the resolution of the biggest cliffhanger the series has enjoyed. Captured and injured, Rick Grimes has to find a way out of the clutches of his captors in time to prevent a veritable army falling upon his companions in their place of safety. Blah blah blah, spoiler-laden plot synopsis, but I should point out that it maintains speed and tension throughout the book like no previous volume has managed to do. And the moral stakes are growing ever higher. The questions are no longer “How can we survive and thrive in the new world?” or “Will we ever find safety?” or even “How drastically must our laws change to accomplish the previously considered goals?” At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if their safety will ever be possible without first evolving into a society that no longer recognizably maintains America’s morality at all, into a society that is only barely more enlightened than the one that they may very soon be at war with. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy the most about zombie stories, which is really to say any post-apocalyptica: philosophical questions that cannot readily be examined in the modern world as it is.

Thank you for expanding my brain, zombies!