Less than a month after its publication, Victoria Schwab’s New York Times-bestselling young adult urban fantasy This Savage Song has been optioned for film by Sony. The first installment in Schwab’s Monsters of Verity series, This Savage Song takes place in the dystopian V-City, where acts of violence breed actual monsters. Joby Harrold and Tory Tunnel of Safehouse Pictures (Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur) will produce, overseen by Sony’s Palak Patel and Aimee Rivera.
There are three types of monsters: the Sunai, who feed on sinners’ souls; the animalistic Corsai, born of nonlethal violent acts and feeding on fear; the Sunai, created from mass murders, who feed on sinners’ souls; and the vampiric Malchai, born of murders. The two main characters are appropriately star-crossed: Kate wants to prove to her father that she’s as ruthless as him in extorting the innocent, while August’s father helps the innocent, even as August himself is a rare Sunai. This Savage Song has drawn comparisons to Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, and Laini Taylor. Here’s the book synopsis:
Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city—a city where the violence has begun to breed actual monsters. All Kate wants is to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam free and makes the humans pay for his protection. All August wants is to be human, as good-hearted as his own father, to play a bigger role in protecting the innocent—but he’s one of the monsters. One who can steal a soul with a simple strain of music. When the chance arises to keep an eye on Kate, who’s just been kicked out of her sixth boarding school and returned home, August jumps at it. But Kate discovers August’s secret, and after a failed assassination attempt the pair must flee for their lives. In This Savage Song, Victoria Schwab creates a gritty, seething metropolis, one worthy of being compared to Gotham and to the four versions of London in her critically acclaimed fantasy for adults, A Darker Shade of Magic. Her heroes will face monsters intent on destroying them from every side—including the monsters within.
You can read an excerpt on Tor.com. The sequel, Our Dark Duet, will be published summer 2017 from HarperCollins.
This marks the second adaptation of Schwab’s work; she’s currently working on the pilot for her alternate-universe fantasy A Darker Shade of Magic (written under V.E. Schwab) for television.
