American cable network AMC has had a lot of success with The Walking Dead, and hopes for more with next year’s similarly comic book-based Preacher. It’s staying with chilling supernatural themes for a new project in development, adapting Joe Hill’s novel NOS4A2 for a new potential series.
Hill’s creepy 2013 tome introduced the world to Victoria “Vic” McQueen, blessed with a gift for finding lost things that also happens to be a curse for her slowly-deteriorating mind. She crosses path with another gifted type, Charlie Manx, who unlike her uses his own powers to seed dread and further his own ends. He abducts children in his 1938 Rolls Royce – the title is his number plate – and drains his passengers’ souls to make him stay young. When he kidnaps Vic’s son, he puts them on a collision course and forces her to risk breaching his nightmare lair.
There’s no writer attached to work on the adaptation yet, but they have a task ahead of them as Hill’s work has proved tough to bring to the screen in the past. 2014’s Horns didn’t quite capture the same level of quality storytelling and other projects, such as a TV series based on the Locke & Key comics he co-created or a planned film of his book Heart Shaped Box remain sitting in purgatory. Still, at least we'll have new Hill fiction next year with the release of his new novel The Fireman.