August Bookshelf - Genre Time!
Escape the month's heat with three elite genre offerings before they get the cinema treatment


'Watchmen' by Alan Moore (graphic novel)
    'The Dark Knight' may sit at the top of cinematic comic book offerings, but Alan Moore's classic dismantling of the superhero mythos is still the ultimate literary achievement of the printed graphic novel medium.  And this is high literature, no matter what your opinion on the merits of the medium may be.  It is harrowing, exciting, terrifying, and heartbreaking, presenting a disconcerting vision of what a world with real 'superhoroes' might actually look like.  It's the only graphic novel on TIME Magazine's list of the Top 100 English language novels of the 20th century, and for good reason.  '300' director Zach Snyder is brining the tale, which had been thought by many to by unfilmable, to the big screen in the spring, so read the source material before the film gets here.


'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy
    The genre of post-apocalyptic fiction has a relatively young but very proud tradition, with masterpieces like Nevile Shute's 'On the Beach' and Pat Frank's 'Alas, Babylon' attesting to its literary importance and potential.  McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning father and son road story might be the best the genre has ever produced.  And make no mistake, 'The Road' is a gruesome, merciless apocalyptic horror novel.  But despite the darkness, the story's heart is so palpable, its characters' love and hope so genuine, that its brutality is often devastating on a level rarely achieved in stories of its kind.  It's as bleak in its view of humanity as 'Blood Meridian' and 'No Country for Old Men', two of the author's other endgame-like tales, but it shines with a glimmer of hope for the nature of man that is rarely seen in McCarthy's work.  Director John Hillcoat, whose film 'The Proposition' is one of the greatest Westerns I've ever seen, is brining the novel to the screen in November with Viggo Mortensen in the lead.  It's shaping up to be a possible Best Picture contender, but read the novel before you see the film to get it's true literary impact. 


'Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three' by Clive Barker
    This grisly anthology by horror legend Clive Barker consists of some of the author's early, more unabashedly straight-up fright stories.   Most of the selections do not portray Barker as a particularly masterful prose stylist, but they do display the untamed imagination that has made him perhaps the genre's premier talent (yes, greater than Stephen King).  The stories range from the surreal and fantastical to the bone-crunchingly realistic.  One of the more famous selections from the collection, 'The Midnight Meat Train', has been made into an American feature film by Japanese gore master Ryuhei Kitamura, which be released in select cities before heading to DVD this fall, and it's generating some great horror buzz.  All of the stories in the book are very entertaining, and a few are genuinely brilliant, so turn out the lights and cozy up with this assortment of nightmare-inducing fables.