Neil Gaiman has long been my favorite author, so any one of his many novels which gets the big screen treatment is going to get my attention. We know The Graveyard Book is being developed right now, and Tom Hanks' Playtone Pictures will be bringing American Gods to the small screen soon. It must be a relationship working out pretty well, because Hanks has picked up the film rights to Gaiman's upcoming book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
While that's already great news, it gets even better with word that Joe Wright (Atonement) is attached to direct it. Gaiman has always been one of the best at using words to create vivid, imaginative worlds, so teaming up with the visually creative Wright should be perfect.
This is still early days, so we don't know who will be starring or even who will be adapting the script. The book's official synopsis is below...[Deadline]
The Ocean At The End of the Lane is a novel about memory and magic and survival, about the power of stories and the darkness inside each of us.
It began for our narrator forty years ago when he was seven: the 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.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is
a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying and elegiac --
as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly's wing, as dangerous as a
knife in the dark.
