William Carlos Williams once wrote, “History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery … the ghost of the land moves in the blood, moves the blood.” Although John Beck never refers to this comment it constantly came to mind as I read his dazzling analysis of the “permanent war” hidden in plain sight in the American West. The growth of the region was “coterminous” (15) with the political and economic rise of the USA and for this reason Dirty Wars rereads American western literature as a counterhistory revealing, if we look closely enough, uncanny stories from within the western landscape. Since Pearl Harbor, the USA has been in a permanent state of emergency, argues Beck, protecting itself from a series of apparent threats and responding to them through internment, nuclear preparation, the war on drugs, and the war on terror, spun together into a dreadful economy of fear. Drawing on threads of theory from Hardt and Negri, Baumann, Virilio and Agamben, this book looks to trace patterns through a range of texts defined as “adversarial literature” (14) – some well-known (Silko, McCarthy, DeLillo, Momaday), some hardly known at all (Page, Carr, Miyake, Meloy), but always unearthing ‘the honeycombed crypts beneath the surface plane of the map’ (183) to create a new political archaeology of the West. Analysing what he terms this “purloined landscape,” Beck's style weaves detailed, reiterated arguments, patterns, and ironies that persuade us of the “lines of convergence” which have constructed this “permanent state of emergency” and demonstrates that, at its best, literature can perform a vital and necessary “critical unveiling” (20). The association of the West with liberty and openness is exposed here as a screen behind which lurks a dark, “gothic” truth about how these myths have been used to shield and hide a terrible, uncanny secret. It is literature's role, he argues, to become countersurveillance, presenting “modes of cognitive and representational disturbance that might warp, fold, or rend the military–industrial desert screen” (44).

At times, the book does strain to remain within its literary boundaries, and showed in its brief discussions of Robert Smithson or Richard Misrach (one of whose photographs adorns the cover) the potential to widen its scope into multidisciplinary connections and lines of enquiry. I thought, too, that criticizing Charles Bowden's A Shadow in the City for its use of “narrative conventions” was to overlook his more experimental work in Blood Orchid, for example, a book which would have worked so well here.

However, these are minor criticisms of an important book which, through convincing and nuanced literary studies, suggests persuasively that in a culture of crazy politics, fantasy fears, and deliberately maintained insecurity, with “everywhere subjected to the obfuscatory concealments and erasures of power” (4), perhaps it is ultimately only through imaginative writing that we come anywhere close to grasping “the ghost of the land [that] moves in the blood” of American history.