Following the announcement that Simon & Schuster may pursue legal action against M. Night Shyamalan (chronicled in my blog entry on August 14), I decided to read the alleged book, Margaret Peterson Haddix's Running Out of Time.

The book chronicles the adventures of Jessie, a spunky tomboy who believes she and her family and friends are living in Indiana in 1840. When several children come down with diphtheria, Jessie's mother explains that it is really 1996 and they are all part of a historical preserve called Clifton Village. Think Colonial Williamsburg, except the people there live that way all the time and are not allowed to leave. Jessie is instructed to escape from the historical village compound -- which is heavily guarded -- and find a Mr. Neeley, one of the founders of Clifton Village who harshly criticized it from its inception. He will call the health department and hold a news conference about the epidemic in Clifton Village, saving Jessie's family and friends.

Most of the book is composed of Jessie's adventures in the "modern" world as she tries to get to a phone and call Mr. Neeley. She finds Mr. Neeley but soon discovers that it is in fact not Mr. Neeley, but one of the directors of Clifton Village posing as Mr. Neeley. She escapes from him and manages to convince several reporters to come to a press conference she holds herself. The reporters are intrigued by her story, especially given that Clifton Village has just announced that it will no longer be open to tourists.

Jessie blacks out and wakes up days later. The events following her blacking out are re-told to her by others; the entire time she was escaping from Clifton Village, she had diphtheria and that's why she blacked out. The original intent of Clifton Village was to create a group of super-immune humans who were not susceptible to disease. Initially, they all had the benefit of modern medicine, but the people who operated the village took that away and actually introduced diphtheria into the village, hoping that the people who survived the disease without antibiotics would be naturally immune to diphtheria and have children who were similarly immune. The tourist village was merely a cover for isolating people in a large historical preserve.

That said, here are the similarities between the movie The Village and the book Running Out of Time:

• A spunky teenage girl as a protagonist
• A setting that seems to be the 19th century but is in fact the modern era
• A conspiracy to prevent the children of the village from knowing the truth
• People in the village dying of a now-preventable disease condition
• The spunky teenage girl is sent to get medicine to cure the disease condition
• An implied, larger conspiracy on the outside to prevent people from learning about the true nature of the sanctuary (the head ranger in The Village, played by Shyamalan himself, tells the young ranger not to ask questions about the woods)

These are some pretty specific plot points, both of which exist in both the book and the movie. Any one of these by itself could be construed as a coincidence, but all six? Shyamalan is, I think, in a world of trouble with this one.

UPDATE: Scott pointed out that the "disease" in The Village is an infection caused by Lucius being stabbed. Matt commented, "Yeah, they've got a bad case of the stabs." Therefore, I've substituted the word "condition" for "disease," since Lucius' condition would be preventable with modern antibiotics. However, recall that the villagers in Shyamalan's film are dying of a disease that is most likely preventable, which is why Lucius wants to venture to "the other towns" to find medicine.