Trailer Park Tuesday: The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

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

Now that’s how you do a book trailer. Haunting, mesmerizing, intriguing, not too long, and not too short, the video for Chris Bohjalian’s new novel The Sleepwalker does its work efficiently and beautifully. Mixing blurbs with shots of a woman hypnotically rising from bed and walking in a trance down to the river, the trailer most definitely makes me want to buy the book. (I already have it on my shelf, so I guess that means I’ll go out and buy an extra copy to give to a friend who’s looking for what The Washington Post calls “a dark, Hitchcockian novel.”) In the novel, a wife and mother, known for her episodes of sleepwalking, doesn’t return to her bed one night and, after a swatch of her torn nightgown is found hanging on a tree branch, her community assumes she is dead but her family and a detective believe that might not necessarily be the case. Things are not always as they seem. I’ll leave you with one last blurb (from USA Today)―one that makes me bump the novel even higher on my to-be-read list: “Great mystery writers, like great magicians, have the ability to hide the truth that’s right before your eyes. Best-selling novelist Chris Bohjalian is at the full power of his literary legerdemain in his newest book, The Sleepwalker...Masterful plotting evokes a magician who distracts his audience to look this way, not that way. The ending will have the reader rereading for missed clues.” This looks like great bedtime reading (or maybe all-lights-blazing-during-the-daytime reading).