There’s always a lot of interest in taking Neil Gaiman’s books to the big screen, but only a few, such as Coraline and Stardust, have actually made it into cinemas. However it seems Joe Wright (Atonement, Anna Karenina) wants to have a go adapting the fantasy novelist’s work, as Deadline reports that Focus Features has snapped up the rights to Gaiman’s The Ocean At The End Of The Lane for Wright to direct.
The book doesn’t reach shop shelves until this summer, but ‘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.’
Hopefully it’ll have an easier ride to the screen than the various attempts to make American Gods, Sandman, and The Graveyard Book over the years.
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