Neil Gaiman’s Next Book Isn’t Out Yet, But A Movie Version is Already In the Works

You’ve done well this time, Hollywood. You’ve done well.

Focus Features and Playtone, the latter of which is also adapting Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods into a series for HBO, have picked up the rights to The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which comes out in book format on June 18, 2013. The film will be directed by Joe Wright, whose previous credits include Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and Anna Karenina.

So who will Keira Knigtley play in Ocean? I kid, I kid. Wright also directed Hanna, which is Knightley-less. But Knightley or no Knigtley, I’m excited about Wright’s attachment. I haven’t seen Hanna and didn’t like Atonement all that much, but I quite enjoyed both Pride & Prejudice and Anna Karenina, and I look forward to seeing what the director will do with the fantasy genre.

But what’s the deal with the book? Writes Deadline:

it’s about about memory and magic and survival, about the power of stories and the darkness inside each of us. The narrator describes a tale that begins when he was seven and a lodger stole the family’s car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and a menace unleashed — within his family, and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a ramshackle farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.

Holy moly, that sounds good. I’ll just be sitting over here, waiting patiently for the book… then the movie.

(via: Deadline)

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