Jonathan Janz came back for another interview with us, and he brought news with him. Marla, the novel that spent four years as a 500-copy sold-out book in collector circles, went wide on August 18 through Weird Tales and Blackstone Publishing.
It is also in development for television. We spent most of this conversation on that second part, because the adaptation story turned out to be much bigger than one book.
Marla Is in Development for Television, and the Showrunner Is Already Building King’s Branch
Jonathan cannot name the showrunner yet, but he lit up talking about her. She is attached to another series right now, which slows things down, and he is fine with that; it’s “a good delay“.
They text daily. She built a Pinterest board for the Marla series where the two of them collect images, and she has been pushing him to think about the origins of the town itself. She wants to know everything about King’s Branch. Everything about who these people were before the book starts.
That pressure produced something readers get right now. The hardcover and the audiobook both include Moonflowers, a 10,000 to 11,000 word novelette prequel. If you read Marla, there is a short paragraph early on about why she became an urban legend, and it references a Halloween night eleven years earlier. Moonflowers is that night, plus the private investigator who took the case. Jonathan and the showrunner shaped it together so the character it introduces can be seeded into a potential second season.
He was careful about one thing, and it is a good instinct: he did not want it to be homework.
I love Marvel movies, but it does feel kinda like you have to do homework now.
He told us, before admitting he still has not watched Wakanda Forever. So Moonflowers is additive and nothing more. Read it or skip it, the novel still works.
“Let the Ultraviolence Begin“
Jonathan has several projects in motion, including a screenwriter adapting Veil and another novelette currently being turned into a script. That second screenwriter felt him out early with a question a lot of authors dread. She warned him that breaking a story from one medium into another can be a violent process, then asked how he felt about it.
His answer:
Let’s let the ultraviolence begin!
Rip it apart. Put it back together in whatever Frankensteinian way works.
He has taught film lit for twenty-five years, so he knows that even the adaptations we hold up as faithful, Rosemary’s Baby and No Country for Old Men, both changed things. His reasoning is simple and kind of beautiful.
If nobody changes anything, the thing still belongs to him, and it can never belong to the people making it. He described his ideal position on a project as the passenger with his feet kicked up, “just grinning, and just enjoying the ride,” instead of the author in the back seat telling the driver which way to turn.
Josh Malerman gave him the other half of this mindset years ago. When Bird Box went to Netflix, the room walked Josh through a list of changes and then held its breath. Josh said it sounded amazing. Everyone was astonished. Jonathan’s read on that is that committing to a film or a series means giving away two years of your life, so being chosen at all is the compliment.
Why Marla Works Better as a Series Than a Feature
This one has history. Patrick White at Lit Entertainment read Marla back in 2024, wrote a 35-page treatment of the whole thing, and pitched it as The Outsider meets Mare of Easttown. He saw a series from the start. Jonathan and his former movie manager had originally pictured a feature, and there was real interest in that version too, so this was never a case of one right answer.
What tipped it was room. Marla is multi-POV and multigenerational: Detective Carl Lancaster, social worker Annie Frost, and 21-year-old Dylan all see a completely different woman when they look at her. Jonathan thinks that shifting structure is actually easier to adapt than a single locked first-person book like Veil, since the cutting between perspectives is already cinematic on the page.
The hard part is Dylan. Threading a younger POV into an adult story without the whole thing tipping into a different show is a real balancing act, and Jonathan pointed to Stranger Things as proof it can be done across three age groups. His line about the failure mode was perfect: you cannot let it become Outer Banks. That is a fine show. It is not Marla.
Arthur, of course, took the opportunity to grind his favorite axe.
I don’t want Marla to become the Dark Tower movie…
He said, which is a fear anyone who read those eight books shares. Meaghan summed up the whole industry problem better than any of us:
Is it just distribution hell?
Widow’s Bay, Other Mommy, and the Trailer That Hijacked The Odyssey
We derailed, and we regret nothing.
All three of us are deep in Widow’s Bay, the Apple TV horror comedy with Matthew Rhys as Mayor Tom Loftis, Kate O’Flynn as Patricia, and Stephen Root as Wyck. Meaghan put it plainly:
I want Patricia to exist so that she can be my best friend forever.
Jonathan admitted he rewound the painting scene about seven times while his daughter begged him to stop. He also passed along that the stunt team told Rhys not to do it because the painting was genuinely heavy, and he did it anyway.
Then there is Other Mommy, Rob Savage’s adaptation of Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, in theaters October 9 with Jessica Chastain. The trailer played in front of The Odyssey and rattled a lot of people who did not sign up for it. Jonathan bought IMAX tickets for his family specifically hoping to catch it, and his theater never showed it, while our Cineplex screening did. Meaghan’s take on the online outrage is correct: the Circe sequence is horror. You were already in the right mood.
Meaghan does wish they had kept the book’s title, for what it is worth. There is a plainness to Incidents Around the House that lets your imagination fill the gaps, and that quality is hard to manufacture.
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The Marla Audiobook Deserves Its Own Conversation
Sean Patrick Hopkins and Patricia Santomasso split the narration, and Jonathan cannot stop talking about it. He already knew Hopkins, who narrated his story “Lenora” in The End of the World as We Know It, the authorized Stand anthology. Santomasso, he had to look up, and then she wrecked him.
He was eating lunch and grading papers when a scene made him belly laugh, and by the end of that same scene, playing Annie, she had him crying at his desk before students came back in.
His broader point stuck with us. Narration is a performance with fewer tools than screen acting, the way Jimmy Stewart had to act in Rear Window from a wheelchair. It is all inflection, silence, and rhythm. So: read Marla, get the hardcover for the foil and sprayed edges and interior art, and take the audiobook seriously.
His next novel, The Stars Have Left the Skies, is a winter horror story landing in July. Panopticon is headed for film. The pipeline is full!