Wendy Webb's Haunted Novels Are Becoming a TV Series Called The Invited

Wendy Webb's novels are getting the TV treatment, and the series taking them on is called The Invited. If her name is new to you, I promise that's about to change, because this is exactly the sort of quietly creepy, slow-burn haunted house fiction I bang on about on this site constantly.

Webb is an American novelist who writes gothic suspense set around the Great Lakes, mostly in a fictional lakeside town called Wharton. Her books are the kind where a woman inherits a huge old house, or takes a job somewhere remote and beautiful, and slowly works out that the place is holding onto something it shouldn't. Buried family secrets, strange neighbours, houses that seem to remember more than they should. If you like your horror cosy on the surface and properly unsettling underneath, this is her whole deal.

What's Actually Been Announced

According to Dread Central, a TV series titled The Invited is now in development, and it won't just adapt one Wendy Webb book. Instead it's weaving several of her connected novels into a single haunted world, which honestly makes sense given how many of her stories already share that same Great Lakes setting and that same sense of old houses keeping score.

Season one, specifically, is built around her novel The End of Temperance Dare. For anyone who hasn't read it, that book is set in a former tuberculosis sanatorium on Lake Superior that's since been turned into a retreat for artists and writers, which is already a brilliant premise before you add a single ghost. According to Wikipedia, it won the Minnesota Book Award for Genre Fiction in 2017, so it's not some forgotten backlist title either. It's one of her most acclaimed novels, and a sensible place to start if you're trying to build a whole television universe out of her work.

Who's Writing It

The name that caught my eye first was Jeff Howard, who's co-writing and adapting The Invited. Howard isn't new to this kind of material at all. He co-wrote Oculus, the 2013 haunted mirror film that's genuinely one of the better "is this object actually evil or are we all losing it" horror movies of the last fifteen years, and he's also worked on Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. If you've seen either of those, you'll know exactly why I sat up when I saw his name attached. He clearly understands slow dread and grief-soaked horror, which is more or less the entire Wendy Webb house style.

He's co-adapting alongside Helen Black, and the series is being produced by Shaun Redick, who produced Get Out, through his company Impossible Dream Entertainment, alongside the UK production company Wall to Wall. No broadcaster or streaming home has been confirmed yet, and there's no release date either, so for now this is very much a "the right people are in a room working on it" stage rather than a "clear your evening" stage. I'll take it anyway. The right people in a room is usually how the good ones start.

Why I'm Actually Pleased About This One

I'll admit I'm fussy about book-to-screen horror adaptations, because an old house full of secrets is so easy to flatten into something generic once it leaves the page. What makes me hopeful here is that nobody's trying to squeeze one Wendy Webb novel into a two-hour film and call it done. They're treating her work as a proper interconnected world, which is exactly how it reads when you work through her books back to back. The sanatorium, the fictional town of Wharton, the sense that every house on that shoreline has history it isn't telling you. A series has the room to actually sit in that atmosphere instead of rushing through it.

If you haven't read Wendy Webb before, this is a good excuse to start with The End of Temperance Dare while the series is still being put together, so you've got the measure of the tone before anyone adapts it for you. I'll be keeping an eye on who ends up attached to direct, and whether a broadcaster picks this up sooner rather than later, because a haunted sanatorium on Lake Superior is the kind of setting I'd happily lose an entire evening to. Has anyone here read her already, and am I late to this one?