Summit Entertainment as purchased the spec script In the Flesh, an adaptation of the teen ghost novel A Certain Slant of Life. Kristin Hahn penned the script based on Laura Whitcomb’s novel, which centers on the ghost of a young woman who died 130 years ago. Her guilt prevents her from moving on, and she falls in love with another spirit who teaches her how to inhabit the body of a mortal whose spirit has died. Variety reports that The Twilight Saga’s Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfre are producing, which signals that Summit is hoping to keep a foothold on the “teen supernatural romance” genre that they’ve so successfully built with the Twilight franchise once the series comes to an end next year. Hit the jump to read a synopsis of Whitcomb’s A Certain Slant of Light.

a-certain-slant-of-light-book-cover

Here’s the synopsis for A Certain Slant of Light:

Helen died 130 years ago as a young woman. Unable to enter heaven because of a sense of guilt she carried at death, she has been silent and invisible but conscious and sociable across the generations. Her spirit has been sustained by its attachment to one living human host after another, including a poet and, most recently, a high-school English teacher. While she sits through his class one day, she becomes aware of James and he–unlike the mortals all around them–is aware of her as well. James, who also died years earlier, inhabits the body of a contemporary teen, Billy. James and Helen fall in love, he shows her how to inhabit the body of a person whose spirit has died but who still lives and breathes, and the two begin to unfold the mysteries of their own pasts and those of their adolescent hosts. Jenny, whose body Helen now uses, is the only child of strict religious parents who controlled her beyond what her spirit could endure. Billy's spirit left his body after a string of tragedies resulting from drug abuse and domestic violence. James and Helen court in both modern and old-fashioned ways; here is a novel in which explicit sex is far from gratuitous or formulaic. Whitcomb writes with a grace that befits Helen's more modulated world while depicting contemporary society with sharp insight. In the subgenre of dead-narrator tales, this book shows the engaging possibilities of immortality–complete with a twist at the end that wholly satisfies. [Amazon]