Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

There are five contenders in the Fantasy novel category for the 2011 Locus Awards presented by the  Locus Science Fiction Foundation: Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay Kraken, by China Miéville Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor The Fuller Memorandum, by Charles Stross The Sorcerer’s House, by Gene Wolfe Winners in fifteen categories, including science [...]

According to this story at Cinema Blend, there’s going to be a remake of the 1984 Drew Barrymore movie Firestarter. Firestarter is a fair-to-middlin’ (mostly middlin’) adaptation of one of my favorite early Stephen King novels. The book, published in 1980, concerns a young girl who can set fires just by thinking about it. It’s [...]

Before you ask: no, I’m not talking about the dreadful Nicholas Cage movie from a few years ago (shudder). I’m talking about the original, the classic, the tragically little-seen The Wicker Man  from 1973, directed by first-timer Robin Hardy and written by Anthony Shaffer, author of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Frenzy and Sleuth, the brilliant [...]

Unless you’ve been dead the last few months, you probably know that Max Brooks’ rather brilliant novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) is being made into a movie. Directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction, and the unfairly maligned Quantum of Solace), the movie stars Brad Pitt [...]

Have you seen The Box, writer-director Richard Kelly’s adaptation of Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button”? You should. It’s brilliant. It’s set in 1976 – the story was published in ’70 — and it’s so well done that it actually looks like it was made thirty-five years ago. The colors are washed out, like they would be [...]

So it’s the thirtieth anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, the second installment in the first of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogies. In celebration  — okay, and also in the interest of making some money — Random House is releasing a splendid book, J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. If [...]

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, subtitled On Sranger Tides, is based on Tim Powers’ popular 1988 novel of the same name (switching out Powers’ characters for Jack Sparrow and the gang). It’s not the only pirate movie that’s based on a book. The various movies called Treasure Island, or something similar (there are at [...]

This May marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Battlefield Earth, one of my very favorite bad movies. If you haven’t seen it, here are Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper chatting about it: I agree with everything they say about the movie, but I still love it, the same way I love Plan 9 [...]

So Sam Raimi is making a movie out of Dennis Lehane’s 2008 novel The Given Day. You know Raimi from the Spider-Man movies, the Evil Dead movies, and Darkman, but wait: you think of those as horror or fantasy movies, but all of them feature well-drawn characters and stories that revolve around the characters. Raimi also [...]

In part one we talked about some of the big- and small-screen adaptations of Dracula. But you vampire fans out there know Bram Stoker’s famous fiend isn’t the only literary bloodsucker. In Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), a vampire tells his story — two centuries’ worth of love, hatred, life, death, and pulse-pounding excitement [...]