Being a babysitter doesn’t sound too difficult. Plop the kids in front of the TV, heat up some grub, and call up your main squeeze to fool around on the couch once everybody’s conked out. Worst-case scenario, you’re entering hour three of a powerful acid trip and mistakenly put the baby in the oven and a full turkey into a crib. But even then, the fact-checking-industrial complex will write off your tragic tale as apocryphal once a few decades have passed and things have sufficiently cooled off. (No oven-baby pun intended.) Author Joe Ballarini, however, has imagined a more fanciful take on hijinks in babysitting, one that most likely involves zero hallucinatory blackened infants.

I’m referring to A Babysitter’s Guide To Monsters, a tween-skewing book that Ballarini is scheduled to publish with HarperCollins in late 2016 or early 2017. Deadline reports today that Ballarini has sold the rights to the not-yet-tangible books to Walden and Montecito Pictures for a cool six-figure payday. (Ballarini will script the film himself as well.) For those of you who may be wondering how the hell a guy sells a formidable studio on a series of books for youngsters that won’t even enter the physical plane for about a year and a half, consider that Ballarini has attained prominence in some circles by scripting Hasbro’s upcoming My Little Pony movie, based on the insanely popular television series Friendship Is Magic. Chances are that the studios are hoping some of the friendship-magic will rub off onto the screenplay for A Babysitter’s Guide to Monsters.

The books will center on “an apathetic babysitter who doesn’t like kids very much” (that is to say, a babysitter), who panics when monsters abscond with the child that’s been left under her less-than-keen tutelage. She falls in with a league of fellow babysitters who regularly do battle with paranormal and otherwise monstrous threats, and together they set out on a quest to retrieve the purloined youngster and save the world. There’s a sweet spot of transcendent silliness, beyond mere whimsy but stopping just shy of balls-out absurdity. The concept of a corps of monster-battling babysitters hits it directly.