It looks like a film adaptation of China Miéville's short story Details is moving forward once again, which is great news if the official sources haven't overstated things as they so often do. Miéville broke onto the scene in 2000 with his urban fantasy, King Rat, a re-imagining of the Pied Piper story set in modern London (and incidentally introducing us to the West African god Anansi, who later turned up in Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Anansi Boys).

If the advent of King Rat was a refreshing breeze through the tired old genre of fantasy, Miéville's second novel, Perdido Street Station, was a subversive gale that tore through a genre that had been producing reactionary, romanticised and unoriginal work for years. If not the father of the New Weird literary movement, a term coined by M. John Harrison, Miéville's fiction does perhaps best typify this style of writing, characterised as it is by urban fantasies grounded in "complex real world models", blending fantasy and often horror, and occasionally science fiction. For an excellent sample of New Weird fiction, check out Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's recent anthology, The New Weird (which is where I found this useful definition of the sub genre).

Details has appeared in several collections over the years, most recently in Miéville's own anthology, Looking for Jake. In 2003 it was included in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and in the previous year in Children of Cthulhu – Chilling New Tales inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. This last inclusion is most revealing of the story's style and origin. Drawing on Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, the story concerns a young boy who meets an elderly woman who has looked too deeply into the patterns that underlie the universe. The publisher's synopsis describes it as the story of a curious boy who "discovers that within the splinters of cracked wood or the tangle of tree branches, the devil is in the details."

The story was optioned by Paramount Vantage in 2006 and adapted for the screen by Dan Kay, who apparently reworked the plot to feature a father and daughter. He also expanded on the story's exploration of pareidolia - a delusional state in which vague or obscure stimulus (sights and sounds for instance) are misconceived as significant (for example, hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse!).

Variety announced this week that French director Pascal Laugier (Martyrs) has now shown interest in the project. Laugier, who is also attached to write and direct a remake of Clive Barker's Hellraiser for Dimension Films, is currently adapting the story himself. Kay's screenplay presumably didn't cut the mustard, although the shift from a story about a boy and an old woman to one about a father and daughter seems to have been retained. Apparently the adaptation concerns a daughter who disappears after awakening supernatural forces that inhabit the random patterns of everyday objects (whatever that means).

Sadly, we've announced too many exciting adaptations (Hyperion, Neuromancer, Elric...)  - all of which have subsequently and very silently disappeared into the Hollywood abyss of once hyped projects - to get overly excited this early in the day. And digging beneath the definitive statements from Variety, this actually sounds more like a development deal, than a done deal.

Still, we live in hope (which is perhaps a delusional state in which vague or obscure statements are taken as significant?).