Trailer Park Tuesday: Sightings by B. J. Hollars

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex.  And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video.  So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

I got a very distinct Benjamin Percy vibe as I was watching the trailer for B. J. Hollars' forthcoming short story collection Sightings.  Maybe throw a little Jonathan Evison and Ron Carlson into the mix, too.  All three of those authors (personal favorites of mine) have written about Bigfoot in their fiction with terrific results.  And now along comes Sasquatch striding through the opening frames of the Sightings video (in a clever nod to the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage).  It's a gorgeous, haunting short film in its own right, wordlessly capturing the odd nature of Hollars' stories which, according to the publisher's synopsis, are

ten thematically linked tales....out to subvert conventional notions of the midwestern coming-of-age story. The stories feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds.

George Singleton calls the stories "pitch-perfect" and says "fans of Kevin Wilson, Lewis Nordan, George Saunders, and Karen Russell need to add B. J. Hollars to their must-read list."  Say no more, George--I'm already burning rubber down the road to the bookstore. Sightings will be released this spring  by Break Away Books, an imprint of Indiana University Press.  If the words on the page are even half as good as these shots of Bigfoot shooting hoops in a gymnasium*, then we're all in for a real treat.

*Trivia alert: The trailer was filmed in the same gym where they filmed the classic basketball movie Hoosiers.  Which I think is twenty-nine flavors of awesome.