Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago Review Press) works as a channel to bring like-minded enthusiasts together. You can read between the lines to discern that the author, Glenn Kay, had an emotionally charged time spending red-eyed nights reviewing almost every zombie film in existence. He gives special credit to Night of the Living Dead (1968) for reviving ­zombie films in general, and midnight horror shows in particular, to this day. The author also credits the book The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) as “a much needed reminder of where the Zombie came from.” What he means is that the earliest zombie movies of the 1930s were historically accurate, at least in that they took place in Haiti and their principal characters were exploited on the coffee or sugar plantations. By the 1960s, the definition of zombie came to mean a more generic living-dead, sometimes flesh-eating, sometimes possessing other stomach-turning traits, but seldom viewed within a larger social context. I missed the film version of The Serpent and the Rainbow, but I did read the memoir by Wade Davis, who was disgusted by the way his book was portrayed onscreen and retreated to Borneo, mortified. I’m not sure what he expected, as Wes Craven was the film’s director. In all fairness, a non-fiction work like The Serpent and the Rainbow would be challenging to translate to screen, especially when sensationalism is the thing that sells. There’s no question that by the 1990s, zombie films were once again being given a more thought-provoking treatment. This renewed sensibility, in the words of Steve Newton, writing in the Georgia Straight, deserves credit “for bringing braininess to the zombie genre—as opposed to just brain eating.” Two films that did not make it to Kay’s checklist are Ubaldo Ragona’s Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (1964) and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls with Candace Hilligoss (1962). These two masterpieces must have influenced the author’s hero, George Romero. Both films include chilling scenes in which the undead pursue and surround the main character—Romero repeatedly paid homage to these in Night of the Living Dead. Less subjectively, I noted three factual errors on Kay’s part, which I’ll mention for other aficionados. First, in his mention of Robot Monster (1953), he says the monster’s getup is a gorilla suit and a robot head, but upon closer inspection, it’s a gorilla suit and a diver’s helmet, an observable distinction. Second, he says William Castle’s last film was Shanks (1974), but in fact Castle made one more film, Bug (1975). (That’s a shame, too, for Castle’s oeuvre may have been more impeccable had he stopped at Shanks.) Finally, he says Rabid was David Cronenberg’s second film, after Frissons, but Cronenberg completists out there will know that Rabid was actually his fourth film (Stereo and Crimes of the Future were the first two). Apart from these hypercritical points, Zombie Movies, with its contagious passion and extensive research, is entitled to top rating.

Ronald Wright, the author of What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order (Knopf), concedes, “The question ‘What is America?’ could fill a library and a lifetime.” Since space is at a premium in this captivating study, Wright makes his points succinct and eloquent, without resorting to the glib Yank-bashing tone heard all over the media. For example, in his chapter “The Winds of Fear,” he summarizes how George W. Bush got elected: “But for Bill Clinton’s dishonourable discharge on an intern’s dress, the 2000 election might not have been close enough for George W. Bush to steal.” Wright encapsulates the frontier-exploiting mindset of the 1800s in this sentence: “‘Manifest destiny’ was on every patriotic tongue—a reissue, in broader currency, of the old Puritan (and new Mormon) belief in Americans as the Chosen People.” He indicates how this outlook has persisted on various levels through the centuries: “Today America’s poor are consoled—some say deluded—by the notion that the economic pie, however unfairly sliced, is always growing, that one day it will be their turn to win the lottery, that they are not an exploited proletariat but, as John Steinbeck put it, ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’.” Wright’s analysis of how our southern neighbour formed its identity reminded me of Howard Zinn’s trailblazer of the 1980s, A People’s History of the United States. One aim of Zinn’s book was to present American history from the point of view of marginalized or oppressed people who were normally excluded from mainstream histories. Wright’s book, by contrast, has a more immediate purpose: attempting to explain why we’re all in the current social and economic muddle.

George Bowering’s novel Caprice (Penguin) is currently out of print, so this Johnny-come-lately review is my way of saying, “Reprint it, already.” When it was first published in 1987, Caprice set the trend for the next wave of stories set in the West. It’s as wistful and rugged as Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, but hetero. Caprice would make a good mainstream film, dubious as that compliment sounds. The protagonist is an independent woman of the Wild West who is tracking the bad guys who murdered her brother. But this is a duster with a twist: instead of a cowboy riding off into the sunset, we’re deserted by a cow woman riding off into the sunrise. Do you recall Richard Brautigan’s genre Western, The Hawkline Monster? At face value, it looks like Bowering is also trying his hand at a Western, although his book is even suggestive of Sanctuary by William Faulkner. (Faulkner claimed he wrote Sanctuary as a “potboiler” only. But what a brilliant potboiler! I guess he could call that great work anything he wanted.) The point is, Caprice is impossible to categorize. If anything, it’s a poetic, insightful eulogy for the classic Western landscape: “By the 1890s the west had started to shrink . . . it shrank with every word that was sent back from the dry country across the mountains and over the Atlantic Ocean . . . The more one looked around in the west the more it seemed obvious that it was the past hanging on for a while.” Bowering doesn’t write in the Zen-story fashion of Brautigan, but the voice in Caprice is pleading for a plainer, more spiritual time.

Editors’ note: New Star Books will publish a new edition of Caprice in fall 2010. Caprice is one of three historical novels by George Bowering set in what is now B.C. with recurring characters and themes. The others, Burning Water and Shoot!, were reissued by New Star in 2007 and 2008.

Ernest Hekkanen’s latest book, Of a Fire Beyond the Hills: A Novel Based on News Stories (New Orphic Publishers), revolves around a displaced monument that commemorates U.S. draft dodgers and deserters. The author/narrator agrees to give the statue a home in his front yard on a quaint cul-de-sac in Nelson, B.C. Then all hell breaks loose, and Hekkanen becomes the recipient of anonymous, creepy phone calls, broken living room windows, hate mail and even a cursory discussion of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Remember that old one-liner, “Even paranoids have real enemies”? When you’re in the narrator’s position of not knowing who your friends are or which enemies are tailing you, there is no better way to describe the atmosphere. Hekkanen captures the daily minutiae of life in a small town, a delightful everyday life that could tip off balance at any time. To make matters worse, tourists from down south hear of the war resisters’ monument and mouth off right to the author’s face. “I lost a good friend over in Iraq, and let me tell you this right now, Mr. Sissy Pants—if you were living down in America where I come from, you'd get tarred and feathered for being an Al-Qaeda sympathizer.” Some of this mentality reminds me of what Henry Miller said fifty years ago: we ban the sale of firecrackers to kids but meanwhile it’s okay to stockpile atom bombs. For the folks out there who are indifferent to what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book seems to whisper, “Stop eating your grilled Gruyère cheese with Roma tomatoes and red onion on open-face sourdough long enough to read me, if you please.”

I’d like to believe that today’s poetry can awaken us from our trance-like state, and that poets can still take flight and alert us of oncoming danger, like the tunnel canaries they are destined to be. These days, however, when you publish a poetry collection, it rarely becomes more than an addition to your resumé, giving you a chance to compete for a position teaching creative writing. Fortunately, 9 Freight, a tight collection of poems by Kim Minkus (linebooks), does its job by challenging us to look at the defeat and humiliation around us. We catch a pathetic glimpse of some of our confreres, going into eyebrow-level debt for 850 square feet of leakiness: “I flash a smile at my economic potential. Then pale at the reality.” People read about war and destruction, and promptly pile up material solace: “from one piece of collateral to another.”  Shallow, strained relationships and routine school systems aren’t helping us out of the mire: “Each tertiary being a binary compound of two / secondaries This is what it takes to be better educated.” These are some of the messages transported to us via 9 Freight. A promo for this work described it as erotic, although a more accurate term might be sensual, or even celebratory. Some of the passages, like this one from “Condo,” remind me of certain lines from the later essays of D.H. Lawrence, for they detail the same loving appreciation of the senses: “my brush is loaded with colour. I can paint / him into a corner. though he is lovely in blue I strip him down and / add black.” In other words, the feeling conveyed is not erotic in its current Hollywood usage (where “erotic” seems to mean having a drink to match the dress, and as many pairs of shoes in the closet as a nouveau Joan Crawford). I suppose if you promote work as erotic you can get potential readers to stop playing Corporate Guitar Hero long enough to prick up their ears; but I’m inclined to promote this book by saying, “Read 9 Freight to increase your awareness of the times, in a lyrical, rhythmic way.”

When I need a little boost, I usually devour the nearest self-help book, and the “boost” lingers for only a moment or so after I close the cover. Then I revert to my regular throw-in-the-towel self. Recently I came across a self-help book with impressive staying power, John Kehoe’s Money, Success & You: Harness Your Mind to Achieve Prosperity (Zoetic Inc.). The 1998 publication date might put you off, especially if you know the book was written eight years prior to that, but this work is not outmoded. The text contains bits of wisdom from past decades that need to be revisited/recycled at intervals anyway, and Kehoe has a website to keep you up to date (learnmindpower.com). He quotes expected sources like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie, and such diverse minds as Andy Warhol, Robert Frost and Henry Miller. He stresses pro-activity in a series of chapters with motivating titles like “Waking up in the age of information,” “Learn to love the word no” and “Taking a good punch.” My personal favourite is a chapter called “Don’t panic,” in which Kehoe has designed an arithmetical chart to help you determine just where you stand on the cosmic hourglass. I’ve never seen anything quite like this simple formula, which provides an instant fix when you want to alter your perspective. A lot of people don’t like to admit they rely on self-help or prosperity-oriented writing. My feeling is, squeeze all the good you can out of it. Try Money, Success and You for its sheer practical value. Discover what to do when someone double-crosses you, in a chapter called “What to do when someone double-crosses you.” And, along with the author, I encourage you to unabashedly set lofty, seemingly unattainable goals. Your success depends on them.

The finest current ghost-story anthology originates in British Columbia—Ashcroft, to be exact. All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society is a thrice-yearly periodical that needs to be more widely known. I discovered it via The Writers’ Yearbook (U.K. edition, 2003) and have never seen a local reference to this gem in our own backyard. The current issue includes film news, interviews, letters and essays, plus twelve short stories, all of which succeed in taking a familiar theme (the ghost world can be repetitive) and giving it an up- to-the-minute spin. Brian Wright’s “Haunted House,” for example, takes the premise of The Sixth Sense into the first-person realm. Peter Bell’s “Resurrection” gives the plot of The Wicker Man a gender change. Sarah Monette’s “Drowning Palmer” echoes William Golding. “The Wainwright Glass” by Geoffrey Warburton is like an old episode of Thriller restored and brought to modern times. Does anyone recall Mario Bava’s classic Black Sunday? Well, the creepiest story in this collection, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” by Brian Day, presents a cemetery scene in such a close and wistful manner (I daresay, enshrouding), that we cannot help but feel that Maestro Bava lives on.

The question you have to ask yourself about One Ring Circus: Extreme Wrestling in the Minor Leagues, by Brian Howell (Arsenal Pulp Press), is this: by the time I’m through with this book , or maybe I should say when this book is through with me, do I want to become a minor league wrestler? The answer is yes. Extreme wrestling in the minor leagues is the last bastion of acceptable marginality, at least the way Brian Howell, the author and photographer, portrays it. Who wouldn’t rush to join the entourage? Two things drew me to this book immediately. First, when I was a kid and a fan of wrestling at the Queens Park Arenex in New Westminster, B.C., I sought the autographs of such icons as Gene Kiniski, Hardboiled Haggarty and Haystack Calhoun. Now, when I look at the contemporary wrestling scene to discover how its performers have evolved over the decades, I’d say they’re about the same, but with a current necessary emphasis on spectacle. Second, Howell photographs both the wrestlers and their devoted audience, and when I saw who that audience was, I thought, Holy cow, I went to school with some of these people! Yes, I recognized many faces in the crowd. They are a little more careworn now than in junior high, when they were my classmates. But I left Surrey and New West behind; looks like they didn’t.

I felt I had a social obligation to make certain that Howell presented the wrestling devotees with the same authenticity, and hopefully respect, as he did the wrestlers. He did. In the words of Stephen Osborne, who wrote the preface: ”[The book] returns the world to its subjects, the wrestlers themselves and their fans, who are presented here unsentimentally, with dignity and honour.” Both the text and the photographs of One Ring Circus are consistently accurate, or convincing might be a better term. Among other things, the wrestling I grew up with had the novelty of a few female wrestlers, but they weren’t taken very seriously. Now, such women as Bam-Bam Bambi and Cheerleader Melissa demonstrate that minor-league wrestling can give women, if not equal time, at least some equal footing in the wrestling hall, “where everything is drenched in the same light.” The partially unsolvable mystery is this: how has the fierce love of wrestling endured through the ages? In more of Osborne’s words, wrestling carries “it’s own spectacular set of customs, conventions, rituals and taboos, and its own practices and traditions.” Even though the pay is often only twenty to fifty dollars per show, and a packed house is seldom more than 350 people, there is the dependable, down-home feeling that we can always claim this netherworld as our own. The accessible glamour of that one ring circus will certainly beckon, once you’ve put down the book of the same title.