EXCLUSIVE: Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards , which is both a podcast and novel, is in the works at HBO as a drama series, Deadline has learned.

Ellis will write and EP with Nick Hall and Brian Young.

The Shards tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city, set in 1981. The podcast dropped last year on Ellis’ Patreon and Knopf published the book on Jan. 17.

Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

The book is reminiscent of other tomes in the Ellis canon, read Less Than Zero which was turned into a 1987 movie with Robert Downey Jr, Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz. The Shards explores the emotional fabric of Ellis’ life at 17—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.

Ellis is repped by CAA, Brian Young and Jonathan Shikora at LGNA.