Book of the Dead (Fab Press)

The history of the zombie flick is the focus of this colorfully-illustrated 2nd Edition film book from Fab Press, featuring over 300 pages of zombie-themed coolness.

It may seem that a volume examining the history ofthe zombie movie would be rather frivolous and unscholarly, but author Jamie Russell seems to have taken on the endeavor with sober determination, setting the scene with Haiti and the geopolitical and literary roots of the early zombie movies, weaving the reader through the various stages of the zombie genre in cinema to the present, and culminating with a welcome zombie filmography at the end. The political tone is a bit terse in spots regarding American colonialism and the zombie in the modern culture, but Russels strives admirably to maintain a plausible, if debatable, social context for the popular zombie films of the last 7 1/2 decades.