Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, and all the rest. This truly is the season to be thankful for everything, as Joe Hill’s stellar 2013 novel NOS4A2 is in the process of being developed into a TV series. And not just for any run of the mill network, but for AMC. This is absolutely a match made in heaven, and there’s a certain Rolls Royce in the parking lot with its engine running.
Nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, NOS4A2 is the time-spanning novel that mostly centers on Vic McQueen, a woman who has for years been gifted with a particular and rather unexplainable talent for finding lost things. She is also finding that the power is making her life worse, but there’s still one more search she needs to finish, and it involves her son and an evil psycho named Charlie Manx that has survived for many years on the souls of others. The story taps into a large range of different kinds of fears, and the prospect of seeing Manx’s Christmasland setting on TV is a present too large to fit under any tree.
At this point, the development process is in its earliest stages, and AMC is trying to track down a writer for the adaptation, according to Deadline. Unless Hill is too busy, which is possibly the case since his next novel The Fireman is being published in five months, I can’t imagine why the network wouldn’t just put this project entirely in his hands. Nor why he wouldn’t want to be the one to be at the helm to make sure it turns out right. So we’ll just assume he’s too busy, or that he doesn’t want to spend another chunk of time with Charlie Manx on the brain. That has to be troubling.
Joe Hill, who is famously the son of horror maestro Stephen King, is no stranger to budding TV projects. He was most recently taking on a potential reboot of the horror anthology Tales from the Darkside for The CW, but they passed on it. He’s also one half of the creative team behind the extraordinary comic series Locke & Key, which has flipped around from produced-but-ignored TV pilot to potential feature, and now it’s apparently back on the TV side of things.
On the big screen, only Hill’s 2010 fantasy horror Horns has made it to full feature-dom as a 2014 feature from Alexandre Aja. The rock-infused 2007 novel Heart-Shaped Box was supposed to become a Neil Jordan flick, but that faded away and is back to basics at Warner Bros.
As the home of The Walking Dead and (formerly) of Breaking Bad, among other quality series, AMC could be a great place for NOS4A2 to wind up. Let’s just hope all the pieces fall into place and no coal gets into our stockings.
