Warner Bros. To Adapt YA Series Monstrumologist

Rick Yancey is having one hell of a year. While Sony Pictures is moving full steam ahead on a big-budget adaptation of his YA alien invasion thriller The 5th Wave, with Chloë Grace Moretz starring and The Disappearance of Alice Creed helmer J Blakeson sitting behind the camera, Warner Bros. has just inked a deal to acquire feature rights for the author’s four-book Monstrumologist series.

Yancey’s books center on a doctor and his young, orphaned assistant who study and (when necessary) hunt monsters in 1800s New England. The Amazon synopsis for the first book, The Monstrumologist, reads as follows:

These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed. But he is dead now and has been for nearly ninety years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets. The one who saved me . . . and the one who cursed me.

So starts the diary of Will Henry, orphan and assistant to a doctor with a most unusual specialty: monster hunting. In the short time he has lived with the doctor, Will has grown accustomed to his late night callers and dangerous business. But when one visitor comes with the body of a young girl and the monster that was eating her, Will’s world is about to change forever. The doctor has discovered a baby Anthropophagus–a headless monster that feeds through a mouth in its chest–and it signals a growing number of Anthropophagi. Now, Will and the doctor must face the horror threatenning to overtake and consume our world before it is too late.

Jessica Postigo (The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones) has been tasked with adapting the first novel in Yancey’s quartet into a series starter. Rights to the subsequent books, The Curse Of The Wendigo, The Isle Of Blood and The Final Descent, were included in Warner Bros.’ deal. No actors have been mentioned in association with the deal, though Warner Bros. is expected to get moving on the adaptation quickly. Expect news about a director and cast within the next few months.

Though I haven’t read The Monstrumologist, I really enjoyed The 5th Wave and Yancey’s other, extremely cinematic Alfred Kropp series. The author has a knack for crafting compelling protagonists and handling action sequences, and I’m sure that same talent is on full display in The Monstrumologist.

We’ll keep you posted as more on the adaptation emerges.