Golden Globe– and Emmy Award–winning actor Elisabeth Moss will star in and executive-produce an upcoming Apple Original series based on South African author Lauren Beukes’ 2013 time-travel serial-killer novel, The Shining Girls, according to Deadline.
Beukes and Oscar- and Golden Globe–winner Leonardo DiCaprio will also executive-produce the series, as will Silka Luisa, a former writer and consulting producer for the Starz series Strange Angel, who will also adapt the novel and act as showrunner.
In the book, set at various points from the 1930s to the ’90s, a man named Harper embarks on a bizarre mission to murder a series of girls who have “a special glow that he must extinguish,” according to Kirkus’ review. He travels through time to give each of his planned victims a small gift, and then turns up again years later to take their lives. However, not everything goes according to his deadly plan—including the fact that one girl, whom he thought he killed in 1989, managed to survive. (Moss will play this latter character in the upcoming series, but no other casting news has yet been announced.)
Kirkus’ reviewer approvingly noted Beukes’ “thrillingly beautiful sentences” but felt that the author’s “considerable imaginative powers seem wasted in this shallow, often ugly game of cat and mouse tarted up with supernatural elements that do not bear too much scrutiny.”
Moss has appeared in several book-to-screen adaptations in recent years, including the ongoing Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s classic 1985 dystopian novel, and, most recently, Shirley, a film adaptation of Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, in which she played author Shirley Jackson.
Another Apple Original series, based on William Landay’s Kirkus-starred novel Defending Jacob, aired on Apple TV+ in April. (Here is Kirkus’ review of that adaptation.)
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
