Harry Potter Director to Pen Fantasy Book Series HOUSE OF SECRETS


News has just broke that Chris Columbus, who directed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has closed a deal with HarperCollins Publishers to publish House of Secrets, a juvenile fantasy series to be co-authored by young adult novelist Ned Vizzini.

Columbus says that the project started out as a screenplay and evolved from there into something more. He picked Vizzini as his partner on this project after reading his novels Be More Chill and It’s Kind of a Funny Story, which was made into a movie with Zach Galifianakis.

Details are sketchy at this point, but the first book is scheduled to hit shelves in 2013. Here is a short synopsis of the project from Shelf Life:

The Pagett kids had it all: loving parents, a big house in San Francisco, all the latest video games . . . But everything changed when their father lost his job as a result of an inexplicable transgression. Now the family is moving into Kristoff House, a mysterious place built nearly a century earlier by a troubled fantasy writer with a penchant for the occult. Suddenly the siblings find themselves launched on an epic journey into a mash-up world born of Kristoff’s dangerous imagination, to retrieve a dark book of untold power, uncover the Pagett family’s secret history and save their parents . . . and maybe even the world.


Brandon Johnston
Written by Brandon Johnston

Brandon is a Reporter, Critic, Tornado Alley Correspondent, Technomancer, and Book Department Editor for SciFi Mafia®. When he's not writing for SciFi Mafia®, he's busy being a dad, a novelist, and a man with more hobbies and interests than is healthy for any one person to have.