"Anna Karenina" Director to Helm New Neil Gaiman Adaptation

Focus Features, along with Playtone co-founders Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, are in the process of securing the rights to adapt Neil Gaiman's new novel "The Ocean at the End of the Lane." The book hasn't even been released yet (it hits bookstores this June) but Playtone pounced on the story like white on rice. " Anna Karenina" director Joe Wright will be directing the adaptation.

The book's publisher, William Morrow, described the story as follows: "It began for our narrator 40 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."

Hopefully it'll make more sense on the big screen.