It’s been so long since I read Peter Straub’s Shadowland that there’s a good chance I forgot a good bit of it before you were born (or maybe you’re just so good looking I’ve misjudged how young you are, right?). The book won a whole load of plaudits and a few awards, and if I remember rightly, it deserved them all.
Now David Goyer is at work adapting the book for an NBC “event series.” That’s a good format as the book is complex, with many different points of view and flashbacks to different periods, but maybe not a good outlet. A network like NBC will require the more extreme and horrific content to be either dialled down or handled very creatively. Or… well, maybe Hannibal proves that NBC are prepared to push things a little further these days.
The story’s starting point is a simple one: two fourteen year old boys in the early 1960s are having a terrible time at school; over the summer they go to Shadowland, the mansion home of one of their uncles, and the secret role of nasty supernatural happenings in their lives comes to the surface.
It’s very clear from the off that one of the boys won’t survive, but there whys and wherefores are actually quite surprising, and certainly entertaining. The uncle is a fascinating character too, and I hope they get the right actor for the part of a sorceror disguised as an illusionist.
We can only hope that NBC’s permissiveness and Goyer’s creativity can meet in the middle to pull this one off. Now please excuse me while I go put the book on my Kindle for a re-read.
