Trailer Park Tuesday: The Farm by Tom Rob Smith

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

If you were tempted by my tease of Tom Rob Smith's new novel in the latest edition of Front Porch Books, then this slick, haunting video should firmly set the hook.  The trailer for The Farm is one of the best of the year; if you didn't know this was for a book, you'd swear it was promoting a new Hollywood movie.  Though some of us can't afford the bundles of money which have been sunk into The Farm's trailer, it's nice to see a marketing department believing so strongly in a novel that they're willing to go all-out with its promotion.  The plot of the novel in a nutshell: Until he receives a disturbing phone call from his father, a young man believes his parents are enjoying a peaceful retirement on a farm in Sweden.  The father tells him that his mother has had a psychotic breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital before she checked herself out and disappeared.  The son prepares to fly to Sweden, but then he's contacted by his mother who tells him that everything he just heard from his father is a lie and that he's the dangerous one.  It's a great setup for a story that's bound to keep readers wobbling on shifting ground, trying to guess what's true and what's false.  The trailer provides some clues to the sinister truth behind the parents' conflicting stories and culminates in a series of disturbing images worthy of filmmaker David Lynch.