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.