'The Hunger Games' screenwriter Billy Ray wrote a YA novel. He has his sights set on a movie trilogy
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On the ShelfBurn the WaterBy Billy RayScholastic Press: 368 pages, $20If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Billy Ray is terrified.Or at least that’s what the award-winning screenwriter says in response to the innocuous-to-the-point-of-pitiful interview-opener: “How are you doing?”Strangely, he is not referring to the state of our country (though he has been scathingly critical of both the Trump administration and the Democratic Party) or the potential perils of artificial intelligence (which he recently described to The Times as “a cancer masquerading as a profit center”) or even the state of the box office in Hollywood’s new age of contraction (Ray famously wrote the now-iconic, pro-cinema Nicole-Kidman-in-a-sparkly-pantsuit ad for AMC.)No, Ray is terrified because his first novel, a YA dystopian take on “Romeo and Juliet” called “Burn the Water,” is about to come out.And though he knows what it’s like when a film underperforms, this feels very different.“If you’re a screenwriter and you write a movie and for some reason people don’t come,” he said amid the clatter and conversation in a West Hollywood coffee shop, “you can hide behind the director, you can hide behind the cast, you can hide behind all kinds of things.
But if you write a book and nobody buys it, there’s nobody to hide behind.”In “Burn the Water,” Ray imagines London in 2425, roughly 300 years after the polar ice caps have collapsed, flooding most of the world in a cataclysmic event.In the turmoil that followed “the Great Soak” of 2100, a biological weapon was set off in London, further decimating its population by nerve gas and creating two warrior houses known as the Rogues and the Crowns.
The Rogues and the Crowns went on to engage in three centuries of warfare over the...