Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel The Names has been optioned for a film adaptation, Variety reports. The thriller weaves together interconnected stories about American expats in Greece who encounter a language cult that is somehow connected to a string of murders. Despite the fact that investigating cult murders has become a clichéd rite of passage for most Americans on their first trip abroad, The Names is critically praised and has been optioned by director Alex Ross Perry.
DeLillo is a prolific writer, but the sole feature-adaptation of his work to date is David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which starred Robert Pattinson as a billionaire who takes the world’s weirdest trip to a barber shop. Perry’s resume includes Impolex, a riff on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, The Color Wheel, which is influenced by novelist Philip Roth, and the critically lauded Listen Up Phillip, which he also wrote. Meanwhile, Perry has been hired by Disney to pen a live-action Winnie The Pooh movie, which finds an adult Christopher Robin returning to the Hundred Acre Wood. Presumably Pooh’s grown-up friend will be able to avoid a first-time tourist’s temptation to solve a series of bizarre of honey-cult murders.