Stephen King, Mellencamp to make musical

ATLANTA - Creating a Broadway musical can be scary enough. Even more so when it's script is penned by horror master Stephen King.

King, who has written numerous best-selling novels, has written the script for "Ghost Brothers of Darkland County," with music by John Mellencamp.

The play will open at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre in April 2009, with the object of getting it ready for a Broadway run.

The Alliance, which announced the project on Tuesday, described it as "a sultry Southern gothic mystery with a blues-tinged, guitar-driven score."

The story is set in the fictional town of Lake Belle Reve, Miss., and centers on the deaths in 1957 of two brothers and a young girl and the legend that grows out of the tragedy.

Peter Askin, whose New York credits include "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," will direct.

The idea for the story was Mellencamp's, and came from a story he heard years ago in his hometown of Seymour, Ind., said Alliance artistic director Susan Booth.