This reader’s on to something….I’m very impressed:

One thing that caught my eye is that a lot of your readers appear, like me, to be fans of Walker Percy.  I’ve been wondering if M. Night Shyamalan is a fan of Walker Percy’s as well, but I haven’t found any discussion of this.  What got me thinking along these lines are several apparent references to Walker Percy and The Thanatos Syndrome in Shyamalan’s The Village.  I went looking through your archives and saw some comments about the movie, but I didn’t see any mentioning the WP link.  The stuff I’m talking about includes several major characters with the last name "Walker," others with the last name "Percy," the setting being the fictional Covington Woods (while Walker lived in Covington, LA), the prominent watchtowers in the village (also highlighted during the credits and on the DVD) evoking the cover of Thanatos (displaying the fire tower occupied by the priest), and the name of the love interest being "Ivy Walker" while my paperback edition of Thanatos was published by Ivy Books.

Anyway, since you seem to be pretty tuned in, I thought you might let me know if you know of any discussion about Night and Walker.  I’d like to understand what he was getting at in The Village with those references.  Maybe he just had the same paperback edition of Thanatos sitting on his desk when he was writing the script.