The Walking Dead started out as a comic book series, and will soon see life as a TV series on AMC, and now it will set out to conquer another format as a series of prose novels, set to release sometime next year. As reported by Deadline, Robert Kirkman’s story about life after the zombie apocalypse will get three novels published by St. Martins Press’s Thomas Dunne books.

The three books will be based on ideas and an outline from Kirkman, with horror novelist Jay Bonansinga writing the actual texts. Bonansinga has several novels to his credit already, and looking at the description of the books (Perfect Victim, Twisted and Shattered) he seems to be a writer whose style will fit well with Kirkman’s own style. Deadline says that the story will take place in the Walking Dead “universe,” so I’m not sure if it will feature Rick Grimes and the rest of the cast of the comic book series, or if Bonansinga will create his own characters and keep them separate from the main cast.

Judging from what I’ve seen of the TV series so far, Kirkman seems to made good decisions in regards to who handles his story in other mediums, so I have faith that he knows what he’s doing with these novels. The Walking Dead has a legion of fans, many of them non-traditional comics readers, so I’ll bet that they’ll eat these novels up like a zombie munching on some juicy brains.