Director Joe Wright brought Jane Austen and Ian McEwan to life, and also helmed the super-assassin movie Hanna. So he might be the perfect choice to adapt Neil Gaiman's next fantasy novel, the as-yet-unpublished The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Deadline broke the news that Focus Features and Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman were in talks to purchase the rights to the new Gaiman novel, with Wright attached to direct. Since the book isn't out yet, all we have to go on is the jacket copy, as quoted by 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.
It starts with a drifter committing suicide in the family car. Read that sentence five times over. Yeah, that's freaking rad. You go, Gaiman.