Trailer Tuesday: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

The blood-gushing elevator. The snowbound maze. The REDRUM lipstick scrawl. The twins in their matching blue dresses. The shine of clairvoyance. We’ve been here before.

I’m ready to go back.

The Overlook Hotel, as we’re told in the opening pages of Doctor Sleep, burned to the ground during Jimmy Carter’s time in the White House. Some, like me, have checked into Stephen King’s haunted hotel for many repeat visits. The bolder ones have even stayed in Room 237....but those guests are most likely dead now.

Doctor Sleep, the sequel to King’s 1977 The Shining, came as a nice gift to his readers six years ago and now it’s going to be splashed across the big screen next week, ready to help us lose even more sleep. It stars Ewan McGregor as the grown-up version of Danny “Redrum” Torrance and his face looks suitably haunted for someone who had a literal hell of a childhood.

Though I still have Doctor Sleep in my to-be-read queue (I’m slowly working my way through my shelf of Stephen King unreads, which is different from his “undeads”), I hope to get to it soon. As always, I’ll stick by my old adage book first, then movie...though I must admit this trailer makes the movie look awfully tempting and my resolve may just splinter like an axed bathroom door (plus, I have a lot of other goddamn books in my TBR pile right now).

Adaptations of King’s work have always been hit or miss (often leaning toward the latter), but the trailer for director Mike Flanagan’s version has just enough visual and aural allusions to both the novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 cinematic masterpiece to make me believe it will be worth the admission price. I’ll be checking in soon.

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

Trailer Tuesday: The Light Years by Chris Rush

I was eating acid three or four times a week, watching my own visions, watching those visions blur into the visions of my companions. I saw him speaking but I had no idea what he was saying because I was watching flowers grow out of his head. We were tripping, again. At thirteen, I took acid as often as possible. Taking acid was like entering a painting or a storybook, a glowing dream world, lush and lovely.

That’s from The Light Years by Chris Rush. It is not a novel, it is a memoir. Does knowing this make that one word, thirteen, all that much more shocking? Does it make you squirm in your seat and sit up a little straighter? I hope so.

Chris Rush was busy doing hard drugs at an age when I was still watching Gilligan’s Island on a regular basis and shaking out the contents of a new box of cereal into a large mixing bowl so I could find the small plastic toy inside before my brother did. I couldn’t even spell the word drugs at that age (okay, maybe I could spell it, but I certainly did not know what they tasted like). Granted, I led a sheltered life as the son of our small town’s Baptist minister, but even so, dealing drugs to my junior-high classmates was as alien as little green men from Mars (of which, I’m guessing, Rush saw his fair share during his weekly trips).

Rush is now an acclaimed artist and the drugs are just one aspect of his life, albeit an important one. Here’s more about The Light Years from the publisher:

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic, New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade. His older sister Donna introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on twelve-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.” After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school, Rush heads to Tucson to make a major drug purchase and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the west. His adolescence is spent looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts on his travels—from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence—it is a miracle he is still alive.

As this profile in Vice makes clear, Rush is indeed a survivor:

The book makes him seem otherworldly, but in it and in person, what’s more striking is that he seems to have no fear. He holds complete faith in his ability to survive, his protection by spiritual and otherworldly entities he seems to know personally; he actually seems like he may be one of the aliens whose existence he began pondering as a child. But instead of remaining an outsider, he has come out the other side hyper sane, even enlightened....Rush started selling psychedelics as an underclassman after being fronted a thousand capsules of “the pink LSD” by [drug dealer] Valentine, which he also takes almost daily and fearlessly, thinking of them as a sort of “brain vitamin.”

The trailer for The Light Years is beautiful and haunting and will make you think for the space of one minute, that you’ve just dry-swallowed a handful of brain vitamins. I love the striking, hallucinatory images which pivot off the book’s cover design; they tug and pull you right into your screen and fill you with a sense of otherworldly calm—right down to the final words spoken in the trailer: Acid always told me everything would be okay.

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

Trailer Tuesday: Women Talking by Miriam Toews

The Margaret Atwood comparisons are inevitable. Dust the surface and Miriam Toews’ new novel Women Talking bears a thematic resemblance to Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale, but go below that superficiality and Women Talking takes on a frightening life of its own. Here, for instance, is the plot description:

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women―all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in―have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

Can I get a collective “Whoa!”? My heart hurts just reading about what I’ll find in the pages of this novel. But Women Talking sounds too good and important not to hear to what it has to say.

For its part, the trailer is remarkably effective in its Mennonite-simplicity, making powerful use of the cover design’s image of pale women, cloistered and half-hidden by stern bonnets. And when it starts multiplying those bonnets into an infinite line, it makes its point loud and clear: listen and learn. Any questions?

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

Trailer Tuesday: Sounds Like Titantic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Milli Vanilli did it. Ashlee Simpson did it. And now Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman does it. In her memoir Sounds Like Titanic, the violinist describes how her orchestra fake-played in front of audiences: string synching instead of lip synching, if you will. Sounds Like Titanic is on my shortlist of books to read this year, and I think you can see, both by the terrific video for the book (above) and by this plot description, how it landed at the top of my pile:

When aspiring violinist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman gets a job with a professional ensemble in New York City, she imagines she has achieved her lifelong dream. But the ensemble proves to be a sham. When the group “performs,” the microphones are never on. Instead, the music blares from a CD. The mastermind behind this scheme is a peculiar and mysterious figure known as The Composer, who is gaslighting his audiences with music that sounds suspiciously like the Titanic movie soundtrack. On tour with his chaotic ensemble, Hindman spirals into crises of identity and disillusionment as she “plays” for audiences genuinely moved by the performance, unable to differentiate real from fake.

I am fascinated by this story and, to paraphrase Celine Dion herself, Sounds Like Titanic is a reminder that near, far, wherever you are/I believe that the art does go on...


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

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist by Michael Downs

This afternoon, a pleasant woman with a smoker’s cough is scheduled to pry open my mouth, reach into its moist depths with her gloved fingers, and yank on my teeth like they were gems cemented to a river bottom and she was the world’s most determined jeweler. There will be pain, there will be a clenching of torso muscles, there will be the airy, sloppy suction of spittle. But when all is said and yanked, I will emerge from the dentist a new man with a new tooth. The only lingering traces of the molar crown work will be the rubbery tingle of a numbed jaw and the monetary throb of the dentist’s bill.

This morning, however, from the dry, pain-free safety of my desk, I’m watching the hypnotic trailer for Michael Downs’ new novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist. The video has the potential to be a Grand Guignol dental horror show—all those teeth! all those rusty metal tools!—but Downs provides a counterbalancing calmness as his NPR-smooth voice narrates a passage from the book. The words are soothing enough to make me unclench my grip and pull my fingernails from the armrest of the dental chair. This passage, for instance, marvelously describes the sensation of anesthesia rippling through the titular Horace:

His body became waves—waves instead of legs, waves instead of arms, waves instead of lungs, the weightless pleasure of waves. He experienced something like a laugh, but it was the laugh of soul rather than body.

Those sentences are so beautiful they bring pleasure even to someone who has a mouth riddled with pain. The novel concerns itself with Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist practicing in the early 1800s who learned that nitrous oxide (i.e. laughing gas) could also help relieve pain. His discovery would change the world, reshaping medicine and humanity’s relationship with pain. Regular readers of the blog already know I am a big fan of Downs’ previous book, The Greatest Show, and I expect Horace Wells will keep me entertained no matter where I find myself today: in a reading nook or a dentist’s chair.

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

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon

Two women, a city boiling with heat and hate, and a simple misunderstanding: these are the driving forces at work in Siobhan Fallon’s novel The Confusion of Languages. The story follows two military spouses, Cassie and Margaret, who join their husbands in their new duty location: Amman, Jordan. As anyone who has traveled to Countries Other Than America can tell you, foreign culture can sometimes be a shock. Fallon (an American living in the Middle East with her Army officer husband) plunges us into that unfamiliar way of life with the ease and authority of someone who has walked in her characters’ shoes. The sights, sounds and smells of Jordanian streets rise off these pages like they were loaded with special effects for our senses. Beyond those rich, sensual details, The Confusion of Languages moves forward at a waste-no-time pace, sparked by a traffic fender bender that quickly spirals into a grave situation involving both Cassie and Margaret and tests the limits of their new friendship. The book’s trailer, created by Fallon herself, gives a sense of that frenetic, jangling, jarring pace of life in a foreign country. The video basically consists of three elements: a jazzy Middle Eastern song, a slide show of images taken around Jordan, and excerpts from praise for the book (including a blurb from yours truly). That’s really all Confusion needs for this short video. Those three pieces—song, pictures, words—work together to make this a terrific trailer for an outstanding book.


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

Trailer Park Tuesday: Tin Man by Sarah Winman

If the trailer for Sarah Winman’s new novel Tin Man doesn’t reveal much about its plot, it certainly stuffs the viewer full of adjectives. Powerful. Remarkable. Exquisite. Perfect. The bar of expectation is raised to Olympic levels. Though I haven’t had a chance to read Tin Man (out today from G. P. Putnam’s Sons), my interest is indeed powerfully and exquisitely piqued. While the book trailer is poor on details, it’s rich in style. In particular, I love how it flows from one blurb to another, like a stream whose current gently tugs you onward—all of which led me to seek out more information about Tin Man, which in turn led me to this nice blurb from bookseller David Enyeart of Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minnesota: “Michael loves Ellis, Ellis loves Annie, and Annie loves them both. Yet Sarah Winman’s blistering novel Tin Man is anything but the usual love triangle. Instead, Winman asks us to consider what remains of love after its object is gone. She crowds this spare little book, set in London, Oxford, and the south of France, with vivid portraits of loss and mourning. At once terse and expansive, Tin Man is a firework flashing in the night—gone too soon but burned forever into the reader’s memory.” And what about the plot? Reader, I’m glad you asked:

Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question: What happened in the years between?

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

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson

Though we are all distinguished and separated from each other by many things—race, sex, religion, and the varied impulses of our personalities—in the end, we all share one thing in common: all of us, each and every one, will someday die. Try as we might (and oh, we try so hard), none of us can avoid our inevitable status as a corpse. To be particularly indelicate about it, we all wind up as nothing more than lifeless meat on a cold stainless-steel table in some morgue or embalming room at a funeral parlor. But what of our bodies’ final lifeless moments before the casket is sealed or the crematorium fire consumes us? Who will give us our final goodbye? In Susan Henderson’s new novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams, that last earthly shepherd for the residents of tiny Petroleum, Montana (population: 182) is Mary Crampton, the funeral director’s lonely daughter who spends a lot of her time embalming bodies before the funeral. Mary herself has never fit in with the rest of the folks in Petroleum: “It’s fair to say I’m not a people person,” she tells us. She is a corpse person, but not a people person. In a way, her own personality has been embalmed. Her true nature is preserved and hidden from those she grew up with. While her father tends to the needs of the grief-stricken in the upstairs parlor, Mary retreats to the silence of her work in the basement.

The trailer for the novel gives some indication of this stark isolation. As a video, it’s an artful short film (I like the way the Barbie doll metaphorically bridges the space between Mary’s childhood and her adult work); but as a trailer, it doesn’t fully capture the surprising warmth and poignancy of Henderson’s novel. It’s like David Lynch directed an episode of Six Feet Under. While I like Mr. Lynch’s work and have enjoyed the quirkiness of the HBO series, The Flicker of Old Dreams feels more potently human to me. In contrast to the nature of Mary’s work, it is alive with emotion and, while I’m only halfway through reading it, I can confidently say it is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Just look at how tenderly Henderson captures the quiet moments Mary spends with the newly-dead as she prepares to go about her work, slicing and stitching and stuffing:

The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets. Here is my scar. Touch it. Here is the roll of fat I always hid under that big sweater, and now you see. This is the person I’ve kept private, afraid of what people would think. Here I am, all of me. Scarred, flabby, covered in bedsores. Please be kind....Perhaps everyone longs for this. Just to be and to have someone stay near....There is no pressure to be charming or clever. We are simply here, together in this quiet.

When we die, may we all have someone like Mary Crampton to be with us in our final quiet moments.


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

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

Just after eleven o’clock on a bright spring morning, the sort of day when the sunshine is almost white and promises a warmth that it doesn’t quite deliver, Diana Cowper crossed the Fulham Road and went into a funeral parlor.

That’s the opening line of Anthony Horowitz’s forthcoming novel The Word is Murder. That sentence in itself is intriguing, especially in the way Horowitz counterbalances the bright sunshine with the emotional gloom of a funeral parlor. There’s something inherently chilly about the notion of death; here, even the sun withholds its warmth. But what ratchets up the intrigue of The Word is Murder is what Horowitz says next in the book trailer: Diana Cowper is there to arrange her own funeral. “She does everything,” Horowitz tells us, “the psalms, the music, even the casket. She then goes home and she’s murdered.” I mean, really, how could you possibly stop reading (or watching) after a setup like that? Horowitz goes on to tell us that the novel features “a classic detective” who is “damaged and difficult.” Okay, it sounds a little like Cormoran Strike in the mystery series written by Robert Galbraith (aka J. K. Rowling); I’m in. But, wait—there’s more, as they say in late-night TV commercials. The sleuth, Daniel Hawthorne, feels he needs an assistant to help him document the case: a Watson to his Sherlock. And that man Friday turns out to be....Anthony Horowitz. The fiction just got meta, lads and lassies. Horowitz’s previous novel, Magpie Murders, was already high on my must-read list. Now this new Word from the author just grabbed on to its coattails and shoved it upwards. The trailer isn’t all that flashy, but I like its simplicity and the way Horowitz explains his book with outstretched fingers—fingers that look like hooks ready to reach out and pull us to his book. The Word is Murder hits U.S. bookstores in June. Sharpen your knives and pencils.


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

Trailer Park Tuesday: See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

There will be blood. Oh yes, buckets and freshets and rivers of blood. Sniff the first pages of Sarah Schmidt’s debut novel See What I Have Done and you’ll catch the unmistakable odor of musky iron, damp earth, old pennies (or, considering the book is about Lizzie Borden, bad pennies). In the first chapter, narrated by Lizzie, Schmidt gives us a gore-streaked description of the axe-work inside the Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts:

Like a tiny looking-glass inside my mind, I saw all of Father’s blood, a meal, the leftovers from a wild dog’s feast. The scraps of skin on his chest, his eye resting on his shoulder. His body the Book of Apocalypse.

Beyond rendering blood into poetry, however, See What I Have Done is a riveting portrait of a mind gripped by madness. What happened in that family home back in 1892 to bring about such personal and deliberate horror from the blade of an axe? Schmidt investigates the mystery and describes the scenes in beautifully-written prose. By the way, contrary to the popular children’s rhyme—heard in the trailer—it probably wasn’t 81 whacks, but more like 30. Still...the horror, the horror.

As for the book trailer (the reason we’re here today), it’s the very best one I’ve seen all year. Here’s what makes it work so well:

• The haunting children’s chorus singing about the 40 whacks
• The ticking-clock pace that ratchets up the tension
• The seep of blood across the wide planks of the wood floor
• The shifting, geometric angles of the camera, hinting at the jarring, unsettled atmosphere of the house on that August morning in 1892

Visually and aurally, the trailer is a marvel. Listen closely to the way all the sound effects (the pendulum tick, the wasp’s wingbeat, the music-box tinkle, the breathy rush of wind) come together. I also love the yellowed papers where we find some blurbs for the book: “What a book—powerful, visceral and disturbing. I felt like one of the many flies on the walls of that unhappy, blood-drenched house.” (Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love)

The book and the trailer are both great. Bloody great.

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

Trailer Park Tuesday: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

       “If there was a murder, then there was a murderer. The murderer is with us...and every one of you is a suspect.”
       “And who are you?”
       “My name is Hercule Poirot, and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.”

That’s right, my little grey cells, the Belgian puzzle-solver is back on the big screen. By my reckoning, the last theatrical release featuring Agatha Christie’s beloved creation was 1988’s Appointment With Death, starring Peter Ustinov. We’re long overdue for a big, splashy Hollywood production—the kind they used to make in the 1960s and 70s where the lobby posters featured the faces of nearly-overripe actors just one disappointing opening weekend away from guest starring on The Love Boat. In the interim, of course, H. P. has been doing plenty of sleuthing on the small screen—most admirably by David Suchet, who sets such a high standard for the character that it will be hard to topple him from that pedestal. If anyone can refresh Poirot, however, it is “probably the greatest actor in the world,” Mr. Kenneth Branagh. As we see in this terrific trailer for the new movie version of Christie’s 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh not only has the accent down—not too thick, not too thin—but his upper lip also bears those famous “moustaches,” here in fuller bloom than we’ve seen before. Just as in the 1974 theatrical release (starring the Oscar-nominated Albert Finney), the 2017 movie is stuffed with an all-star cast: Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley, Derek Jacobi and Josh Gad. I can’t wait to climb aboard and start gathering clues when the Orient Express leaves the station in November.


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

Trailer Park Tuesday: White Fur by Jardine Libaire

The trailer for Jardine Libaire’s new novel White Fur oozes 1980s New York City grit and glitz to such a degree, I picture Bret Easton Ellis standing off-camera with a mirrored tray in his hands, ready with two snowy lines of cocaine. Though the novel is less Less Than Zero than it is Romeo and Juliet, White Fur looks like it’s fueled with an endless supply of pharmaceuticals and sex that will drive readers forward through the pages. As the publisher’s plot summary tells it, the novel focuses on two star-crossed lovers: “Elise who grew up in a housing project without a father and didn’t graduate from high school; and Jamey, a junior at Yale, heir to a private investment bank fortune and beholden to high family expectations ....White Fur follows these indelible characters on their wild race through Newport mansions and downtown NYC nightspots, SoHo bars and WASP-establishment yacht clubs, through bedrooms and hospital rooms, as they explore, love, play, and suffer.” With an energetic pace and flickering jump cuts, the trailer certainly gives us a good feel for the 1980s urban life, both high- and low-. As Kirkus Reviews notes, we get that in the book as well: “The real strength of the novel is its Technicolor atmosphere: Libaire’s New York is a glittering whirlwind, raw and sweaty and intoxicating. A page-turning whirlwind steeped in pain and hope.”

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

Trailer Park Tuesday: American War by Omar El Akkad

Near the beginning of American War by Omar El Akkad, Sarat Chestnut tells us she is, among other things, a hoarder of postcards and a chronicler of war. These two elements of the narrator’s life converge in the very first paragraph:

When I was young, I collected postcards. I kept them in a shoebox under my bed in the orphanage. Later, when I moved into my first home in New Anchorage, I stored the shoebox at the bottom of an old oil drum in my crumbling tool-shed. Having spent most of my life studying the history of war, I found some sense of balance in collecting snapshots of the world that was, idealized and serene.

Many of us feel like we’ve lived with war our entire lives (and, indeed, some high school students have known nothing but a numbing cycle of battle and blood, battle and blood), but Sarat lives in a world nearly 60 years in the future when war has been joined by plague, flood, and refugee camps as threats to the American way of life (whatever that’s turning out to be these days...). Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, says American War “has an air of terrible relevance in these partisan times.” She knows what she’s talking about since Station Eleven is also a terribly relevant prediction of our apocalyptic future. In the trailer for American War, Akkad says when he wrote the novel, he little imagined we might very well be living in the prologue by the publication date (next month). Still, little in American War should come as a surprise to readers. “Nothing in this book hasn’t happened,” Akkad says. “It just happened to other people and it happened far away.” We should no longer go around in our comfortable American bubble, falsely safe in thinking “it can’t happen here.” American War delivers battle and blood to our front porch, then rings the doorbell.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Blitzed by Norman Ohler

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

There are many words we can use to describe Third Reich Nazis: thugs, torturers, murderers, exterminators. Now, thanks to Norman Ohler’s new book, we can add one more: pill-popping drug fiends. It’s a subject that rarely, if ever, comes up when we talk about Germany’s powerful elite in the 1930s and 40s. “I think historians have been afraid to touch it,” Ohler says in the video for Blitzed (a marvelous title full of double meaning). I like this trailer for several reasons, including the fact that even though the majority of the two-minute running length is little more than Ohler talking to the camera, instead of the traditional interview filmed in a safe, sedate studio, he’s shown out on a busy street buffeted by gusts of wind—the kind of place where a Nazi drug deal might have gone down 80 years ago. “We don’t look at how drugs shape history,” Ohler notes. And that’s very true. “Adolf Hitler, Tweaker” is not something you’ll find in too many history textbooks. When he was told Nazis “took loads of drugs,” Ohler thought it would be a good idea for his next novel. But after doing research in the archives, he discovered the truth was stranger than fiction. Though it would be wrong to solely blame meth for Nazi atrocities, surely the drugs played some sort of role in what happened during World War Two. As Ohler dug deeper into the subject, the book gradually came together. And now, as of last week, we can all go get Blitzed in the bookstore.

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).

Trailer Park Tuesday: I See You by Claire Mackintosh

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

The trailer for the new novel by Claire Mackintosh, I See You, is creepy as that guy in the coffee shop who keeps glancing up from his laptop to watch you carry your venti light-foam cappuccino from the counter back to your table on the other side of the room. The same guy who is still sending eye-flicks in your direction 10 minutes later. The same guy who packs up his computer and loose-leaf papers in his messenger bag, goes up to the counter to order another cup of coffee, then appears to be heading out the door, but takes a sudden detour at the last minute and decides to sit at a different table...just ten feet from where you’re sitting. Yeah, that guy. As the trailer for I See You points out, we live in a look-over-your-shoulder world. In the case of the novel, according to the publisher’s jacket copy, “Every morning and evening, Zoe Walker takes the same route to the train station, waits at a certain place on the platform, finds her favorite spot in the car, never suspecting that someone is watching her.” The trailer, culminating with an eye staring deep into the camera, is chilling as an ice cube some prankster slips beneath your shirt then stands back and laughs as the cold trickles down your back.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Romeo and Juliet by David Hewson

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

We’ve all heard the story: Boy meets Girl, they fall in love, their parents object, Boy and Girl get married anyway, Boy is banished from town, Girl pretends to kill herself in order to join Boy, Boy doesn’t get the memo and thinks Girl is really dead, Boy kills himself, Girl wakes up and finds her dead lover, Girl kills herself. The End. Unhappily Ever After. For those of you who’ve never read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, I guess I just spoiled your reading (but, honestly, I don’t care; if you haven’t read the tragedy by this point in your life, then you should make like Ophelia in Hamlet and get thee to a nunnery). R & J is a time-tested, time-worn classic romantic tragedy that has become such a part of our popular culture, its original story and meaning often get lost in the superficial shortcuts we use to describe the young lovers. What we need is a fresh pen to help us see the story from a new perspective. Enter David Hewson with his vibrant and startling revision of the tale. Hewson’s Romeo and Juliet is only available as an audiobook, but it’s good enough to warrant getting a membership with Audible.com. There are many surprises in Hewson’s book (I promise not reveal the major ones); chief among them is Juliet’s character—a strong woman ahead of her time, a Renaissance feminist who does her best to stand up to her father and protest the arranged marriage with the rich, older Paris. There’s also a backstory for the kindly Friar Lawrence, whose brother turns out to be the pivotal and fateful Apothecary. All in all, Romeo and Juliet proves you can put new clothes on an old, tired body and have it look fresh as a daisy. It certainly helps to have a narrator like Richard Armitage. I was drawn to Romeo and Juliet in part due to the terrific reading Armitage gave David Copperfield earlier (and of course I’ve loved his on-screen performances in The Hobbit and North and South, among others). Though the characters’ voices are more Irish than Italian, I got used to the continental drift pretty quickly and fell headlong into the dialogue. When all is said and done, Armitage and Hewson combine forces to deliver a familiar story that sounds like we’re hearing it for the first time. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at Armitage as he discusses why and how he took on this project:

Trailer Park Tuesday: Kill the Next One by Federico Axat

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

Not too long ago, I mentioned Kill the Next One in the monthly Front Porch Books feature. I wrote “If you want to know why Frederico Axat’s psychological thriller shot right to the top of my must-read pile for 2016, you need look no further than the opening lines.” And those first sentences? See if you aren’t hooked, too:

     Ted McKay was about to put a bullet through his brain when the doorbell rang. Insistently.
     He paused. He couldn’t press the trigger when he had someone waiting at the front door.

The short trailer for Axat’s novel is also a good reminder of why we should all move this book to the top of our TBR piles. It’s simple and not too flashy, but it has a creepy, haunting vibe that sets the stage for the novel. A series of blurbs (“More plot twists than all of M. Night Shyamalan’s filmography put together”) parade across the screen as a soundtrack that sounds like a recording of wind in a subway tunnel plays in the background. It’s twenty-four seconds of unease. And, hey, who wouldn’t be intrigued by that last blurb from Goodreads reviewer Chris? “Beware of the possum!”

Trailer Park Tuesday: Mooncop by Tom Gauld

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

As a long-time fan of Tom Gauld’s comics (ever since You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack came out), I’m looking forward to his latest, Mooncop, landing on my bookshelf. With a sense of humor as dry as toast (but twice as tasty), Gauld loves to poke fun at the often inflated, self-important literary canon and scientific conventions. Tom Gauld keeps the rest of us humble with his wit. Mooncop looks like more of the same: a satire of the space program (spoiler: our moon colony is a failure) and an homage to detective novels. As Wired magazine notes: “At once hilarious and achingly melancholy, [Mooncop] reads like a requiem for the future we were promised decades ago that never arrived.” The animated trailer gives a good idea of what waits for us in the pages of the book. A lonely cop on lunar duty sits around his patrol car eating donuts and coffee while waiting for his latest call to come from the dispatch center. Though it turns out to be mundane—a dog has gone missing—it seems that's exactly what we can expect in a moondust-and-crater society. Boredom and disappointment wait for us in the future. As the woman who called for police assistance says, “Living on the moon....Whatever were we thinking? It seems so silly now.” Meanwhile, her dog runs across the lunar landscape in his little protective bubble, most likely wishing he was back on Earth, too—where he could trot into a bookstore and, if he had enough dog biscuits, buy a copy of Mooncop.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch

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

     This is where your lost toys went, the one the dog chewed, the one your mother threw out without asking when you left home, the ones you always wondered about.
     The island says: bring me your lost, your scorned, forgotten masses, bring me your maimed and ridiculous, bring me so much as a finger or a toe and I’ll take you in. Be you ever so grotesque or beauty sublime, it’s all the same to me. Everyone’s allowed in. Doesn’t matter who you were or what your story, doesn’t matter what state you’re in. You could’ve been smashed to smithereens, even your broken bits are welcome here.

From these opening sentences onward, Orphans of the Carnival, the new novel by Carol Birch, asks us to look beyond the superficial, beneath the skin, below the grotesque. These are particularly pertinent words in this new nation under Trump. We may label the unfamiliar ones among us “freaks,” but aren’t we all deformed in some way or another? Orphans of the Carnival centers around Julia, a 19th-century woman with an “utterly unusual face,” who is put on display in a touring show. The trailer, with its soft carnival music and flickering questions, offers a good tease of the book without giving too much away. In the end, this minute-long video does make me want to “look closer.”