Director Chris Columbus (Home Alone) has nabbed the film rights to Michael Koryta's thriller The Cypress House. Columbus, whose production company 1492 Pictures recently wrapped the movie adaptation of The Help (which will be out in August), plans to adapt Koryta's novel set in Florida during the 1935 Labor Day hurricane.
Koryta signed two three-book deals with Little, Brown after publishing a string of thrillers with St. Martin's Press. The Cypress House, which came out in January 2011, marked the author's second book with LB, after So Cold the River. In the novel which, like So Cold the River has a supernatural bent, a World War I veteran with clairvoyent abilities winds up at an almost deserted seaside resort with a friend during the height of the Great Depression.
