The Top 15 Books for Beach Reading This Summer

As summer gets rolling, people start heading to the beach. If you are like I, summertime and time spent on the beach means time during which you can read without any sort of real time constraint or guilt. So, since books are my passion and obsession, here are my 15 recommended books for beach reading that'll make your time on the beach that much more enjoyable:

1. Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story by Clive Barker. (New York: HarperTorch, 2001). This is only my second foray into the written world of Clive Barker (I read Cabalyears ago, and have seen two or three of the Hellraiser movies), but I must say that I was quite impressed. Coldheart Canyon is a ferocious indictment of (and backhanded tribute to) Hollywood Babylon, depicted through Barker's glorious imagination as a nexus of human and inhuman evil where fleshly pursuits corrupt the spirit. It's also one ripping ghost story, spooky and suspenseful, as well as (I understand) a departure for Barker in that here, as never before, the fantastic mingles with the real, kind of. The book takes a long time to get started, the first 150 to 200 pages are dreadfully slow, but once the book finds its pace, it doesn't let up. Barker entices his readers to leap into a fantastical world populated by ghostly beasts that roam the hills of a modern-day Tinseltown. His masterful descriptions of this world and the pathological behavior that occurs within it provide an eerie realism, compelling the reader to venture further. This is, in essence, a 686-page supermarket tabloid, the kind of story that would result if Billy Wilder had made Sunset Boulevard as a German Expressionist silent film, with a healthy dash of Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolai Gogol thrown in for good measure.