Joe Wright To Direct Adaptation Of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

Even though we’ll probably never see a proper Sandman film, fans of author Neil Gaiman have been pretty spoiled in recent years, with Stardust, Mirrormask and Coraline adaptations all getting time on the big screen, as well as Beowulf, which he wrote the screenplay for. With the upcoming HBO production ofAmerican Gods still not cancelled or postponed, and Ron Howard’s name attached to The Graveyard Book, it looks like 2014 will be another banner year for the clever Brit.

As if those weren’t enough, Deadline reports Gaiman’s upcoming novelThe Ocean at the End of the Lane has already found a home with Focus Features and Playtone, the production company owned by Tom Hanks and producer Gary Goetzman. Carrying on the Gaiman adaptation trend of acquiring great directors, Joe Wright, responsible for drama such as Anna Karenina and Atonement, is attached to direct.

Considering the recent success Goetzman and Hanks have had lately, with the award-winning political miniseries Game Change and the award-winning post-apocalyptic web series The Electric City, Gaiman’s involvement will only solidify Playtone’s ability to balance reality-based fiction with imaginative fantasy.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, like most Gaiman works, is a multi-layered tale full of darkness and redemption. I can’t say it any better than the publisher can, so here’s their description:

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 duck pond 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.

The book was already highly anticipated, but this just ratcheted things up a few levels.The Ocean at the End of the Lane hits bookstores on June 18, 2013.