Here’s one poll that might have amused John Updike: the Jacksonville (Ill.) Journal-Courier asked readers to vote on their must-see films for Halloween, and, wouldn’t you know it, the cinematic adaptation of Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick made the list. That’s no doubt because of Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top performance as Darryl Van Horne and director George Miller’s decision to go Beetlejuice wild with Updike’s story of three divorcees in a small New England town where sexual politics and witchy mischief take center stage.

The 1987 Warner Bros. film starred Cher as Alexandra, Susan Sarandon as Jane, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Sukie, with Veronica Cartwright playing Felicia and Richard Jenkins playing Clyde.

Editor David C.L. Bauer said that readers could choose from a list of “100 movies of all genres or add their own.” The Witches of Eastwick was the second film cited in the article, right after It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and ahead of The Ring, Coraline, Fright Night, Goosebumps, Evil Dead, Young Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Hocus Pocus.

Rotten Tomatoes critics weren’t quite as enthusiastic. Sixty-six percent of the critics who saw the film thought it was “fresh” and merited a 6 out of 10 or better.

Read the whole article.

Go ahead and guess. You know you want to.

Is it one of the novels (or short story cycles) featuring the irascible and irrepressible Henry Bech, Updike’s Jewish-writer alter ego?

Is it The Coup, Updike’s satire of American overconsumption and African dictators?

Is it one of Updike’s so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy–the commune exploits of S. or the punitive desert retreat to which that serial philanderer Tom Marshfield was sentenced that held comic forth in A Month of Sundays?

Nope. In the estimation of the folks at ShortList, it’s Updike’s Hawthornesque romp The Witches of Eastwick, which comes in at No. 13 on their list.

“The big screen adaptation is naturally hilarious,” ShortList writes, “but Updike’s original source material is a wonderful exercise in satire. Three women in the Rhode Island town of Eastwick acquire witch-like powers after being spurned by their husbands. Swearing to wreak vengeance they run amok until the mysterious appearance of Darryl Van Horne. What follows is high farce and social satire rolled into one. Mischievous doesn’t begin to cover it.”

Keziah Weir recently published a piece in Vanity Fair revealing “8 Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month.” And what better fall reading is there than that Updike fall guy, Henry Bech—Updike’s Nobel Prizewinning Jewish alter ego, who tends to get in the same kind of awkward situations as Larry David?

The “we” includes Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Andrew Sean Greer, who tells Weir that he “felt a certain kinship with other writers who returned to the same character and voice again and again: ‘Most obviously for me is John Updike, his Rabbit books and his Bech books. Much more the Bech books, because there, John Updike seems to be just having a really good time, and I think those are more successful, looking back, than the Rabbit books, which just seem too misogynous to read. The Bech books are still a hoot.'”

Greer, who wrote Less and the sequel Less is Lost, also talks comparatively about Philip Roth and Updike before adding, “Finding a voice you want to always write in is just . . . You don’t want to let go of that for something else.” Maybe that explains why Updike chose to keep writing Rabbit novels and even a novella after his character’s death, and why Roth wrote about Nathan Zuckerman in “half his books.”

Asking a scholar or avid reader of John Updike to name Updike’s “best” will likely lead to a longer list than any superlative can contain. But Most Recommended Books took on the task, using an intuitive three-step process that involved searching “best john updike books,” studying the top five articles that came up in the search, and adding only books mentioned two times. Then they ranked the results, though we’re not told who “they” is or how they determined rank order. To quote Casablanca, the usual suspects are here, plus a few surprises in this somewhat suspect ranking:

Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit at Rest
The Witches of Eastwick
The Early Stories
The Centaur
Bech: A Book
The Widows of Eastwick
Self-Consciousness
In the Beauty of the Lilies
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
Couples
Bech at Bay