HBO Should Adapt Emily St. John Mandel's New Novella 'Exit Party'

HBO already has the perfect Station Eleven replacement sitting on a shelf. It's Exit Party, Emily St. John Mandel's newest dystopian sci-fi novel, and Collider reports that a bidding war for television rights broke out in March, months before the book was even published.

Exit Party picks up the story of Ari Waker, a character who first appeared in Mandel's 2010 novel The Singer's Gun. In that book, she ordered the murder of her cousin and seemed to have disappeared. Exit Party opens with Ari leaving prison after nearly two decades, released into a Los Angeles that is unrecognizable. The U.S. has been torn apart by a civil war. Normal life is gone.

Ari ends up at a party celebrating the lifting of a citywide curfew. Then she notices duplicate people milling around. The doppelgangers set off a sci-fi thriller that moves across the U.S. and later Europe, where Ari struggles to survive against death and loss.

The book is split into two halves. Side B introduces a completely different version of Ari from an alternate universe. This version is a strict, rule-following member of law enforcement. In her world, the U.S. has become a surveillance state where friends and neighbors turn on each other to avoid prison sentences. The two sides share similar haunting personalities.

Laika, the animation studio behind Coraline and ParaNorman, won the adaptation rights in that March bidding war, along with Emma Stone's production company, Fruit Tree. No streaming home has been announced yet.

Collider argues that HBO should pick it up. The settings created by Mandel would be visually impressive: a Paris with a dome over it to control the weather, a world where your face is scanned to pay for groceries. A director like Station Eleven's Hiro Murai could bring both eerie settings to life. Multiple episodes or even several seasons could let flashback episodes explore Mandel's detailed worlds further.

HBO's Station Eleven landed seven Emmy nominations. Mandel's new book could fill the hole that series left.