The Walking Dead Descent and Invasion (Review)

 As I continue my reviews of the Walking Dead books, the next two in the series notes the Jay Bonansinga going out on his own without the help of a solid Robert Kirkman story to piggy back off and sadly...it shows.

The next two books in the series are chalked FULL of cliche characters and situations we've seen played out an exhaustive amount of times before in the past.

SPOILERS from this point on....

The main villain in these books is a Pastor....who has followers and....is evil. Not only that, but he's one of them "drink the kool aid, the end is now" type of pastors. A role we've seen far too often in the past.

I have serious doubts about the authors imagination if this was all he could come up with. The Walking Dead has never been good at portraying religion.  Hence the reason why (even in the TV show) Baptist churches look like catholic churches because neither Kirkman (nor Banansinga for that matter) have ever been inside one.

But besides the total ignorance on the subject you KNOW the character is bad when you meet him. Sure the book goes through the motions trying to convince you he's just a harmless old pastor but you KNOW he's a cultist! So there is ZERO surprise when you find this "twist" out. It's so anti-climatic it hurts the entire series!

What would have been surprising is if the pastor actually turned out to be a decent guy who just wants to help. But nope! He's the same black and white character we've seen a million times. Even with the backstory of having an abusive father too! The only thing missing was for him to tie the hero on the train tracks and cackle of the locomotive approaches.

Needless to say, I wasn't impressed with these two books. I'll review the others later.