In 1995, a short review from an editor at "Factsheet Five" described the serial run of "Light House" as a "gritty screwball comedy set in a Massachusetts coastal hotel during a raging winter storm" that is "very, very funny". After the original serialization of "Light House", Monahan reluctantly rewrote the novel several times at the urging of his agent in New York City. In 1998 "Light House" was sold to Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Putnam, and Warner Bros. immediately optioned the film rights while the novel was still in manuscript. Penguin Putnam wanted to delay publishing the novel in order to release it concurrent with the anticipated film release. Warner Bros. hired Monahan to write the screenplay adaptation of "Light House". In 2000, "Light House: A Trifle" was finally published in hardcover, and then, the following year, in paperback. Monahan and Bruno Maddox, a fellow former "Spy" editor, went on a joint book tour billed as the "Minor Novelists Tour" that was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks. Less than four years after the novel's publication, Monahan bought back the film rights to "Light House" "I didn't like how the book was published. They wanted to wait for the movie to be made. I got a little hostile. When I was in Spain on Kingdom, I realized I could buy it back. It was an empty, damaging gesture." In an interview with Collider.com he stated that, "It was demoralizing to write a really good book and to realize how little the rewards were, even though the book did quite well, as far as first novels are concerned." "Light House" was available in a German edition, translated by Ulrike Seeberger. "Light House" intentionally references the satirical novels of the early 19th-century British author and satirist Thomas Love Peacock, such as "Headlong Hall" and "Nightmare Abbey". Peacock's novels have little plot and are best known for parodying the intellectual modes and pretenses of his contemporaries; his characters normally assemble in characteristic English country houses and predominantly engage in conversation. "Nightmare Abbey" satirized the English romantic movement and included characters based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. When "Light House" was published in 2000 it was critically acclaimed, however, it had lackluster sales. William Georgiades, in a review for "The New York Times", called it "a sort of old English farce that allows Monahan […] to skewer whatever comes to mind: modern art, magazine writing, education, the young".