Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber

This book is a fairly typical zombie thriller dressed up in Star Wars garb. Darth Scabrous, a Sith lord in charge of a school for Sith, has discovered the secret to immortality. He orders the Jedi Hestizo Trace to be kidnapped, in order to gain access to the very rare Murakami orchid with which she has a special Force connection. The only problem is a side effect of the immortality potion causes the dead to walk. Lots of fun zombie fights, but in the end I didn't really care very much about any of the characters. I enjoyed it for its peek into the Star Wars universe in the days long before the movies.

Down These Strange Streets edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

This anthology contains short stories loosely united by what the editors call urban fantasy. I enjoyed the Lord John story in this anthology ("Lord John and the Plague of Zombies" by Diana Gabaldon) more than any of the other Lord John stories (and really, more than most of the recent Outlander books). "Death by Dahlia," a new Charlaine Harris story set in the Sookie Stackhouse universe was also entertaining. There was a story that featured Dashiell Hammett and another that seemed a clear take on The Maltese Falcon. I enjoyed the stories set in Rome (there were two). There was also a good one about a jazz musician. A few had mythological worlds so complex, it was hard to figure out what the rules were in the course of the story. Overall a very entertaining collection.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

This book recounts the actions of a sweeper, trying to clear the skels out of Zone One to reclaim Manhattan for human habitation after an apocalyptic zombie plague. While by the end it becomes a moving meditation on survival and humanity, it was a little difficult for me to get into the flow of the story--the time keeps jumping and it was hard for me to piece out what was going on exactly. As a portrait of what it might mean, psychologically, to live in a post-apocalyptic world, I appreciated this book for its thoughtfulness and for its refusal to sugar-coat the experience.

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphor, and Media into the Twenty-First Century by Marina Warner

This book investigates representations of the spirit and the supernatural, starting early but really hitting its stride around the early eighteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. It considers representations of the self and a spiritual presence in material (wax, cloud, photographs, film) and immaterial (ether, air, ectoplasm) forms. The book casts a wide-ranging net to gather its evidence--we see examples drawn from art, literature, material culture, and many other places. Generally it argues that despite our increasing understanding of the processes in the world and our increasing secularization, we still need, perhaps more than ever, representations of spirit. I thought the last chapter, on zombies, was particularly effective. The book had a refreshing tone--it treats moments of spiritualism (like knocking, expulsion of ectoplasm, etc.) as moments to be studied for their interpretative value, not as phenomena to be definitively proven or disproven.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

This book purports to be an oral history of the zombie war. It's a really enjoyable account. The book does a good job of working its way through to cover the war fully despite being set up as a series of interviews. We don't get to know any of the individual characters terribly well (many of them just have one section), but overall it paints a compelling and exciting portrait of humanity in crisis.