Author Neil Gaiman (Coraline) will release his first adult book since 2005's Anansi Boys with The Ocean at the End of the Lane, due to drop later this summer.  Focus Features and the Playtone team of Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are currently closing a deal to acquire the novel's feature rights.  It looks like the producers are tapping Joe Wright (Anna Karenina) to direct the adaptation.

The latest of Gaiman's works to be put into development, The Ocean at the End of the Lane centers on a narrator who tells a tale from his childhood that involves suicide, horrible monsters and the protection provided him by three strange women in a rundown farm at the end of the lane.  Hit the jump for more details.

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Deadline reported on the acquisition of the movie rights to The Ocean at the End of the Lane, as well as Wright's attachment to the picture.

Here's the synopsis of The Ocean at the End of the Lane (via Goodreads):

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.