Surviving the Unthinkable: Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead"

The rule has always, ALWAYS been this: no zombie comics before bed. By “zombie comics,” I of course mean Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s ongoing tale of zombie apocalypse, “The Walking Dead.” By “before bed,” I generally mean not right before bed, moments before you turn off the lights and lie awake in the dark, trying and failing to stave off the general dread that comes creeping in from the shadows like stealthy, implacable hands, until you can’t take it anymore, you just can’t TAKE it, and finally you grab your robe and a warm cup of milk with some nutmeg in it and dash to the room in the house with the most light and turn on reruns of “Friends” until your happy thoughts return. At least that’s my experience.

“The Walking Dead” is one of those conundrums you find sometimes in horror fiction: the story that makes you feel not just scared but actually UPSET, and yet you are compelled to keep reading. The difference between “The Walking Dead,” and, say, “The Shining” (another masterpiece of unsettling fear) is that “Walking Dead” is ongoing. Its journey had a beginning and a middle. And a middle. And a middle. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight … well, I’ll be honest. It delights me and worries me at the same time.

Unlike many other zombie stories, where the focus is either on plot or situation, “The Walking Dead” takes the time to focus on characters. The problem here is that the more we care about them, the more vulnerable we are to their plight. And, man, do they have plight. We have watched our hero Rick Grimes – along with his family and his friends – try to make uneasy peace with the situation as it is, and end up failing each time. Along the way, we have watched the people we care about suffer horribly: some are decapitated. Some endure horrific sexual assault. Some are beaten within an inch of their lives. And these are just at the hands of survivors. The genius of Kirkman’s writing is that, just when you start to forget why these people are in such a desperate situation, the zombies encroach, and they kill you. Hard.

Kirkman’s canny genius is in crafting a bleak, unrelenting story that somehow remains utterly compulsive reading. Every month I wait in giddy anticipation for my slim monthly chapter, and every month I am left with a general malaise, unable to stop ruminating on what I’d just read. It’s not a feeling I’d seek out from any other source, but from this, it not only seems warranted but necessary. There’s nothing like a fictional zombie apocalypse to show you how silly it looks to complain you don’t have enough for that third Starbucks beverage.

This past issue – number 57 – almost hurt to read. After a surprisingly blasé beginning dealing mainly with the best road to take toward Washington, D.C. (where one of the survivors thinks there may exist a way to end the apocalypse), things take a startling turn as Rick Grimes, his son Carl, and new character Abraham Ford get captured by a group of rogue survivors. The group isn’t interested in killing them; they are after eight-year-old Carl for more … carnal reasons. Rick, absolutely unwilling to let his son be taken in this way (or any way), rips his captor’s throat open with his teeth. Even after letting the boy go, the marauders are not spared Rick’s wrath. What follows verges on inhuman, and it is both disturbing and fascinating to watch Rick remain mostly unaffected by what he feels he was forced to do. After losing his hand, most of the people he loves, and – at least temporarily – his mind to this bleak new world, he seems to have come to grips that he will do whatever it takes to hold onto his one small sliver of sanity in an insane world.

Watching Rick kill someone in much the way a zombie would is unsettling on a number of levels, not the least of which is our ability to accept him doing it. We’ve been following Rick for years now, and have seen what has driven him to this point. We’ve lived this life with him, and watched his world crumble out from under his feet. By this point in the narrative, we are forced to ask ourselves if we’d do the same were we in Rick’s shoes. I think the answer might disturb us. One begins to wonder how prescient Kirkman was in titling his comic as it is: who, truly, are the walking dead: the zombies, or the people who are trying to survive them?

The solicitations for the next issue feature only two words of copy: THE UNTHINKABLE. After all “The Walking Dead” has put us through, “unthinkable” is a bold word choice. I have every confidence that Kirkman will deliver. From his book “Invincible,” I get a great, almost lighthearted superhero story every month; from his “Astounding Wolf-Man,” I get more playful horror – gothic mixed with the superhero genre. But here I can count on the unthinkable, because this book has conditioned me to. I am scared, and a little nervous to even pick the book up. But of course I will, despite all my reservations. Because there’s something even more powerful than my unyielding sense of dread:

I just gotta know what happens.