Races are cool and races that can result in death are even better, but you have a sure hit on your hands when you have the racers riding flesh-eating horses, so Warner Bros seems to know what they’re doing now that they’ve picked up Maggie Stiefvater’s YA novel, The Scorpio Races, for the big screen.

The Scorpio Races just hit bookstores in October but The Hollywood Reporter recently announced that Warner Bros has already snagged the film rights for Stiefvater’s book, with KatzSmith Productions set to produce.

In the same fashion of The Hunger Games, The Scorpio Races revolves around an annual competition where contestants (usually in the teen ages) take part in a dangerous race that results in some competitors dying before the finish line is reached. However, instead of racing on foot or playing a wilderness game of survival, the participants ride kelpies, flesh-eating water horses based on Celtic mythology.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a YA adventure without the prerequisite ‘young love’ angle so this particular race includes Puck Connolly, the first female to ever take part in the races. While trying to stay alive in her quest to cross the finish line, Puck starts to get that special flutter in her heart for the reigning champion of the race, Sean Kendrick.

I haven’t read The Scorpio Races yet but I’ve heard good things about it, and it might translate to the big screen better than some other books because the author actually pictured a movie while writing the book.

“I have to confess,” says Stiefvater on her LiveJournal page, “of all the books I’ve written, this is the one I wanted made into a movie in the worst possible way. As I wrote, every scene was translated into words from a visual movie scene in my head.”

Will The Scorpio Races become the next Twilight or Harry Potter franchise? It’s too soon to tell but someone has to fill that slot and I think flesh-eating horses stand just as good of a chance as anything else does.