According to Deadline Hollywood, Focus Features and Playtone are securing the rights to “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” the new novel from Neil Gaiman. Normally, that would be exciting enough news on its own, but there’s a glimmer of hope that this one won’t sit sadly on a shelf somewhere because Joe Wright is on deck to direct the adaptation.

The synopsis of the book from Good Reads: “It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark 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 menace unleashed – within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a 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.”

But you know, it’s the man who made Hanna, Atonement and Anna Karenina taking on a modern literary genius. Do the details really even matter? And when we we getting that “Good Omens” movie anyway?…