10 Books That Should be Made Into Movies

The following titles range in genres and range in publication date. They are fun, scary, hilarious, sexy, tense, sob worthy and action packed. Okay, each story isn’t all of those things but the stories fall into those categories, somewhere.

Paul Is Undead 

Paul Is Undead is an hilarious story about the British ZomBie Invasion. John Lennon is a zombie who plans to take over the world. He joins up with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and the ninja Ringo Star. The book follows the real world history of the Beatles and throws in some brain munching zombies, psycho ninjas, demons and the scariest of all: bad album reviews.

Parable of the Sower

Octavia E. Butler was a brilliant sci fi writer who broke all the rules. Sower is one of her finest examples. She creates a dystopia that is haunting similar to our modern world, with ordinary people in fantastic situations. In Sower, Lauren Olamina is a hyper empathic 18 year old woman living in a world full of pain and suffering. She discovers that she alone knows the truth about the nature of God and begins migrating to the pacific northwest. This story has helped define my spirituality in a way no other book has. Seeing it on the big screen would be epic. It would be nice to see more black films done by people other than Tyler Perry, too.

The Accidental Werewolf 

Dakota Cassidy writes stories in a strange place. They are romance, to be sure, full of vampires, werewolves and other monsters but they are nothing like the twilight stuff. Dakota is funny, more than anything. The Accidental Werewolf follows the story of a Bobby Sue cosmetics saleswoman. Her life is all about color wheels and hard sales and the dream convertible. That is, until her puppy is attacked by a large, beastly dog.  The saleswoman, Marty, rescues her dog but is bitten in the process and becomes a werewolf. This would be a great romantic comedy. Way better than the other paranormal romantic comedies out there. Ghost of Girlfriends Past? Bah. Oh, one more thing, Dakota’s characters have filthy mouths that utter filthy words, also there is some really hot sex. Not for the timid.

Zero Girl

Sam Kieth wrote one of the most under rated comics of all time. His graffiti inspired art work, his surreal and magical way of telling stories, and his emotional connection to the stories he tells gives us some of comics all time greats. Zero Girl is about a young woman who is obsessed with Circles. They protect her from squares. No, she isn’t OCD crazy, squares are really trying to kill her. To make matters worse, our hero is in love with her high school guidance counselor which only adds to her bad reputation and social isolation. Oh, and her feet get wet. Carl Jung makes an appearance in the form of a sow beetle and a painful memory drives Zero Girls supernatural abilities. This would be a feast for the eyes, and would warm the hearts of any. 

Joplin’s Ghost

Joplin’s Ghost is one of my favorite books. It tells the life stories of two musicians, Phoenix, a modern RNB singer with a moderately successful career that is falling into obscurity, and Scott Joplin, one of the best ragtime pianists of all time. Phoenix becomes haunted by the ghost of Scott Joplin and the two’s lives become deeply entangled. Joplin’s Ghost is a fun, scary, sexy and cool ghost story unlike any other. It mixes historic fact with modern fiction and bends the scope of all realities.

Cruddy

Lynda Barry is, as far as I can tell, completely insane. Cruddy is not what it looks like. It looks like the story of a young girl who is bored and lives in a very dull city. It looks like a book for children. It is, in fact, a book filled with gruesome violence, drug usage and rampant child abuse. Cruddy follows the story of Roberta, a young girl who takes drugs for the first time and then spills her life story out to her new friend. Her life story follows her adventures with her father, a mean and nasty man who insists on calling her Clyde. Roberta and her father travel the country, drinking hard liquor and fighting and killing people. The story follows Roberta in both time lines, in the modern time line her and her new friends take hallucinogenic drugs and trip up and down their home town. This would be an insane flick, rated hard R, that would speak to the darkness inside of each of us.

Brooklyn Dreams

J. M. Dematteis tells another story about drugs. This is the story of how LSD led him to Buddhism. It is a fantastic read with brilliant art. J. M. has become the definitive spiritualist in comics but it isn’t a story about a comic writer, it’s a story about a teen boy with no hope and no future having horrible experience after horrible experience with drugs and finding his way to Buddhism. It is a powerful read, even for nonBuddhists like myself.

The Arrival

In a world where immigration is a hot button issue, The Arrival, which is a wordless comic that helps you sympathize with an immigrant to a new land, tugs at heartstrings in ways you don’t expect. This brilliant comic could be made into an animated film with such heart it would rival Up.

Signal To Noise

Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman have worked together on many comics, any of which deserve to be on this list. Signal To Noise, how ever, finds a special place above the rest. It is visually stunning, as all of Dave’s artwork is, and is about a film director who is dying of cancer. As he is dying he is working on a film that will never be made, it is the story of a village who fear the end of the world. This story explains mankinds lust for end of the world type stories and why they are so important to us. In a post y2k world that is on the verge of 2012, how can this not be an important piece of work?

The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova wrote one of the best pieces of vampire fiction ever. It is brilliantly researched and cleverly references Bram Stokers Dracula. Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight–one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi’s student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula’s beleaguered homeland–sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.