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A new trend appeared this week with famed directors trading in the clapboards and megaphones for inkwells and laptops.  The reverse has happened before with author Michael Crichton directing cinematic classics like Coma, Looker, and Runaway, but I don’t recall a director who moved from the big screen to the Kindle… until now.  (There must be previous directors who’ve written novels so if you know of one, please enlighten me below.)

First up, The Independent is reporting (via Fearnet) that David Cronenberg (The Brood, Crash) has just signed a deal for his first novel.  Only forty pages of  “Consumed” have been written so far but that was enough for publisher Fourth Estate to snap up the rights in a “vicious bidding war” that somehow only netted Cronenberg a five-figure sum.  The plot…

revolves around a married couple, who are investigative journalists working on two separate stories. The wife is in Paris, delving into a bizarre crime where a woman has been killed and possibly eaten, and whose husband has also apparently disappeared. The journalist’s husband is elsewhere in Europe, writing about a new treatment for cancer devised by a renegade doctor. His unorthodox methods involve planting radioactive nodes near the cancerous cells.”

Definitely sounds promising and right up Cronenberg’s biologically terror-filled alley.  The publisher describes the first pages as having a “slightly uneasy dark feeling but also a funny tone.”  Sounds awesome.  He’s scheduled to hand in the complete manuscript this year for publication next fall.

Also entering the literary world is famed zombie director George Romero (Martin, Dawn of the Dead).  Per DreadCentral, Grand Central Publishing (no relation) will release two novels by Romero set in his “of the Dead” world.  Romero will reportedly be “laying down the ground rules of the zombie epidemic right from the beginning of the end.”  Part one is due summer 2010.

Which novel seems more appealing?