Prolific author Nicholas Sparks will debut his latest work, “Remain,” on Tuesday. This story stays true to the romance basics of the author of “The Notebook” and “A Walk to Remember,” but explores the horror genre, which is new to him. Part of that is thanks to director M. Night Shyamalan, who co-wrote Sparks.
The project, which included plans for Sparks and Shyamalan to co-write the novel Remain and turn it into a film a year later with Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor to direct, confused some fans of both creators when it was first announced. At first glance, these two artists seem very different until you consider the one thing they both value when it comes to writing love stories and horror stories: a solid twist.
And while it took until Sparks’ 25th novel for the two to try to combine their destructive powers, this wasn’t the first time the two had to work together.
“A long time ago, when ‘The Notebook’ was being made into a movie, I approached a screenwriter to write the script, and that was M. Night Shyamalan,” Sparks told Variety in an interview last month. “He was busy writing this movie, The Sixth Sense. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that movie. I wonder what happened in the end.”
Joking about Shyamalan’s most iconic work aside, Sparks added, “The original screenwriter was Jean Sardi, and then they decided to bring in a new screenwriter, which ended up being Jeremy Leven, but they had asked Night Shyamalan to do it. So we’ve known each other’s careers for a long time.”
“Remain,” released Tuesday by Penguin Random House, follows Tate Donovan, a New York architect looking for a fresh start when he arrives on Cape Cod to design a vacation home for his best friend, according to the publisher’s description. Tate, who was recently discharged from a high-end psychiatric hospital where he was being treated for acute depression, continues to grapple with the loss of his beloved sister Sylvia. Her deathbed revelation – that she can see spirits, a gift passed down in her family and still connected to the living world – unsettles Tate, who struggles to believe in more than reason can explain. But when he takes up residence in a historic bed and breakfast on the Cape, he meets a beautiful young woman named Wren, who challenges all his assumptions about the logical, regimented world.
Sparks and Shyamalan began the project by dabbling in each other’s genres and brainstorming ideas. The two decided to adopt Shyamalan’s idea, and Sparks began working on the manuscript for the novel Remain, while Shyamalan wrote the screenplay. (Sparks said he was leaving the door open to potentially moving forward with another concept he proposed, saying, “If this all goes well and we’re in between projects, we might be able to do a project of our own. It’s a good love story, but it’s a little scary.”)
Sparks finished writing the book in January 2024, and Shyamalan finished production on the film this summer, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor, on track for an October 2026 release.
Projects like this are a minefield of spoilers, so Sparks has little to say before Remain’s release, but he does tease a few things. One of them is that “When you read the book, the final pages kind of give you a glimpse of Knight and his past work.”
The other thing is that when you finish reading Sparks and Shyamalan’s novel “Remain,” you shouldn’t automatically assume that it’s going to play out the way Shyamalan’s film version will be released next fall.
“Will it happen? I’ll tell you, one of the questions I asked Knight was, do you want the ending to be the same? Do you want the development to be the same?” Sparks said. “And we made a decision about it. We have to read the book and see the movie.”
