Hungry for more work after directing Katniss Everdeen through her fight against the Capitol, director Francis Lawrence has signed on to executive produce and direct a new TV series based on Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere.

If you’re unfamiliar with the book, first released in 1996, it has the potential to make for a very interesting series.

Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her–and the life he knows vanishes like smoke. Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won’t stop for him, his landlord rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

Another description of the book says it is “reminiscent of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Neil Gaiman’s humor is much darker and his images sometimes truly horrific.” Yeah, that‘s a description to geek out for.

Neverwhere, adapted to television before by the BBC, is not the only project Lawrence will be taking on, as he’ll also lead a TV series based on the Charles Belfour novel House of Thieves.

In 1886 New York, a respectable architect shouldn’t have any connection to the notorious gang of thieves and killers that rules the underbelly of the city. But when John Cross’s son racks up an unfathomable gambling debt to Kent’s Gents, Cross must pay it back himself. All he has to do is use his inside knowledge of high society mansions and museums to craft a robbery even the smartest detectives won’t solve. The take better include some cash too ― the bigger the payout, the faster this will be over.

Lawrence will be a very busy man, especially since he has also been tied to a Red Sparrow film, as well as a new movie version of The Odyssey. His third Hunger Games movie, the 4th and final in the series, opens in November, and he has clearly capitalized on his success with the series.

Which new project of Francis Lawrence are you most excited for? Share your thoughts right here or risk becoming invisible, stuck in a shadow comments section no one else can see.

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HT: Slashfilm.com

Image: Lionsgate