Watchmen
Alan Moore, 1986
★ 4.39 from 610.6k ratings on Goodreads
Science fiction Mystery, thriller & crimeFantasy
A murder mystery among retired superheroes becomes a cold look at power, memory, and what it costs to save a city that may not deserve it. A cold, intricate murder mystery that keeps shifting between awe and dread, with a melancholy voice and a slow, deliberate pace.
Feels like dread, awe and melancholy. About power, morality and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy morally tangled crime stories, alternate history, and comics that ask hard questions about power. Be warned: the narrative is dense and dark, and some readers find its philosophical weight pretentious or frustrating.
Why read it
It gives you a murder investigation that opens into questions of memory, morality, and power, told through images and text that reward close attention.
A page from the book
What time looks like to someone who can see it all at once.
I am two-hundred and twenty-seven million kilometers from the sun. Its light is already ten minutes old. It will not reach Pluto for another two hours. Two hours into my future, I observe meteorites from a glass balcony, thinking about my father. Twelve seconds, into my past, I open my fingers. The photograph is falling. I am watching the stars. Halley’s Comet tumbles through the solar system on its great, seventy-six year ellipse. My father admired the sky for its precision. He repaired watches. It’s 1945, I sit in a Brooklyn kitchen, fascinated by an arrangement of cogs on black velvet. I am sixteen years old. It is 1985. I am on Mars. I am fifty-six years old. The photograph lies at my feet; falls from my fingers, is in my hand. I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories through space and time. What readers say
Readers frequently praise the work as a brilliant, complex masterpiece that explores morality and power. However, some found the dense, dark narrative overly pretentious or frustrating.
Alan Moore.Alan Moore wrote Watchmen with artist Dave Gibbons; the story's title comes from Juvenal's Latin question, 'Who watches the watchmen?'
Books that feel like this
More by Alan Moore
V for Vendetta
Alan Moore, 1982
A masked anarchist blows up a fascist Britain's symbols and teaches a young woman to see the state for what it is.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Watchmen for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy morally tangled crime stories, alternate history, and comics that ask hard questions about power. Be warned: the narrative is dense and dark, and some readers find its philosophical weight pretentious or frustrating.
- What is Watchmen like?
- A cold, intricate murder mystery that keeps shifting between awe and dread, with a melancholy voice and a slow, deliberate pace. Feels like dread, awe and melancholy. About power, morality and time.
- What should I read after Watchmen?
- If you liked Watchmen, try Vicious (V.E. Schwab), Foundation (Isaac Asimov) and Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card).
A taste of the feed
The mistake that doesn't look like one until later.
The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there’s no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning. Between one sip and the next, Victor made the biggest mistake of his life, and it was made of nothing more than one line. Three small words. "I’ll go first.
Vicious · V.E. Schwab
What it feels like to wait for a whole planet to appear.
What Gaal was waiting for after the disappointment of the Jump was that first sight of Trantor. He haunted the View-room. The steel shutter-lids were rolled back at announced times and he was always there, watching the hard brilliance of the stars, enjoying the incredible hazy swarm of a star cluster, like a giant conglomeration of fireflies caught in mid-motion and stilled forever. At one time there was the cold, blue-white smoke of a gaseous nebula within five light years of the ship, spreading over the window like distant milk, filling the room with an icy tinge, and disappearing out of sight two hours later, after another Jump.
Foundation · Isaac Asimov
What if understanding someone is the first step toward destroying them?
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them... I destroy them. -” “You beat them.” For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding. “No, you don’t understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.”
Ender's Game · Orson Scott Card
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