Warning! Spoilers ahead! If you haven't yet seen M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and don't want The Twist to be revealed, then stop reading here!

That said, here's a funny story. I was telling Michelle about The Village and how it was set in the 19th century and that Matt didn't care for The Twist, and she responded by spinning an interesting tale. She said she remembered reading, in eighth grade or so, a book about a 19th-century society which, it turns out, wasn't 19th-century at all. Chronologically, the people in this little town lived in modern times, but the parents were keeping that information from the children, acting as though it were the 19th century, designing 19th-century buildings, even making their children memorize the presidents only up to a certain point in the 19th century. The parents were supposed to tell their children the truth when they turned 13 or 18 or something like that, but they stopped doing that and the children grew up believing it was the 19th century. Eventually, though, the children found out.

When she told me this, my jaw dropped about ten feet. Michelle hadn't seen The Village or heard anything about the plot, and here she was, telling me almost exactly what The Twist was. I told her that what she had just described was, in fact, The Twist from The Village. She was amazed!

I did a Google search, looking for a book that may resemble the plot of The Village, but Michelle couldn't remember the name of the book or the author. It appeared that we would never know the name of the book whose plot preceeded The Village by at least eight years.

Until now. I did a simple Google search and the first result was an article from MSNBC dated a mere two days ago. Margaret Peterson Haddix wrote her first book, Running Out of Time, in 1995. In Haddix's book, "adults in a bucolic 19th century town keep the same secret from their children, and a plucky tomboy journeys through dangerous woods to get medicine." Sound familiar? Yup, that's the plot of The Village. Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Running Out of Time, is contemplating a lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company, the distributor of The Village. Haddix was tipped off when friends and journalists noted the similarities between the two works and asked her if she had sold the concept to Shyamalan. She hadn't.

What are the odds that two people come up with this same idea? Is it really that obscure a concept -- people duped into believing they live in a particular time when, in fact, they don't? It's quite an interesting situation and I certainly don't know what to make of it. For the time being, I can only give credence to Haddix's suspicions that Shyamalan may have stolen the idea from her.

Apparently, this isn't the first time this has happened to him, either. In 2002, a screenwriter from Pennsylvania sued Shyamalan, claiming that he took the idea for Signs from an unpublished screenplay of his. That time, the incident could be written off. This happens to lots of successful writers: people sue them, claiming that they got the idea first, but there is never any way to prove it. This time, there is definitely proof. Running Out of Time sold half a million copies and won awards. This is not a question of "he said, she said." Shyamalan has some tough charges to answer to: a book which was definitively published many years before The Village, with the same obscure plot? Even down to the detail that "a plucky tomboy journeys through dangerous woods to get medicine"? If Shyamalan didn't plagiarize the plot, this is a fantastic coincidence. If he did, then how did he think he would get away with it?

I've got to find a copy of this book. I hope Michelle still has hers.