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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

Somewhere between attempts at adult novels in 2000, author Darren O'Shaughnessy had his first big hit: a juvenile vampire novel about a character named after him who became caught-up in a world of vampires. The children's novel became a best seller, quickly growing into an internationally best-selling series. Always looking for more vampire movies to feed an ever-growing modern vampire film genre, Hollywood seized on the success. With the 12th and final book in the series having been published a few years ago, a film adaptation of the first three books is being brought to the screen courtesy of Paul Weitz (American Pie, About A Boy) and Universal Pictures. The film stars John C. Reilly, Salma Hayek and Willem Dafoe. If successful, the film could theoretically be the first in a four-part series adapting all 12 novels. Is it worth it? And how does the film compare with the book?

The Book

The first three novels in the Cirque du Freak series open as a standard story about a school boy named Darren who is fascinated with spiders. We see Darren going through his daily life including class, schoolmates and parents. Shan's life begins to change quite dramatically thanks to a casual fascination with a flyer a friend of his has for a traveling freak circus coming to town. Darren and his friend make it out to the show - something of an idealized and fantastical kiddie fiction treatment of the old circus freak shows that largely died out in the mid-20th century.

Darren's friend recognizes a spider charmer named Mr. Crepsley from a book he has about vampirism and asks him if he could join Crepsley as his assistant. Reluctant at fist, Crepsley tastes the boy's blood only to find him unpalatable (evidently in the world of the books, a person's nature can be tasted in his or her blood. Darren is still fascinated by Crepsley's spider and actually manages to get up enough courage to steal it from the Cirque du Freak. Time passes and the show has moved on to other towns, giving Darren a feeling that he had gotten away with the theft. Everything is fine until Shan's friend gets bit by the spider, prompting Shan to ask Crepsley for an antidote. Crepsley will only give the antidote if Shan agrees to be turned into a "half-vampire" in order to become his assistant. Though he does not like the idea of traveling with the vampire, Shan agrees to become a half-vampire, thus launching the story into a long and winding episodic plot involving a young boy who must abandon his parents in order to save his friend.

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