A curmudgeonly late-adopter of new book-tech, I'd never seen a trailer for a novel before Lauren Beukes's Shining Girls creepfest, screened at a Kitschies event, introduced me to the idea. It looked brilliant, tightening the skin over my shoulder-blades like the sort of horror film I'd like to see but really shouldn't (for my family's sake. You can call for a glass of water as much as you like, kiddo: the shadows in the kitchen say different.)
Having seen it, I'm now holding off – painfully! – from reading the book. I need to efface my memory of the characters as the trailer's actors presented them, faces and voices already part-formed. Instead, I want hunter and hunted to appear in my own mind, gradual and unique. Fictional protagonists should develop differently for each reader, like Tristram Shandy's Widow Wadman, whose inexpressible "concubiscibility" requires the page be left blank. I don't want to start out with a nudge.
This pre-forming effect affects me less in trailers for kids' books, which often have illustrations, lending themselves instantly to animation. That doesn't give me the same sense of foreign bodies intruding too early in the private, enclosed relationship between book and reader – I tend to find it more enriching than encroaching. In the trailer for Patrick Ness's Carnegie winner A Monster Calls, the combination of Jim Kay's shadowy, poignant, frightening images, brought carefully to moving life, and the black and white text, floating unvoiced in violin music, seems like a small work of art in itself, living up beautifully to the challenge and tragedy of the book.
Children's books are also more likely to have words that beg to be read aloud. I liked the trailer for Lane Smith's It's a Book particularly, for the laconic richness of the big ape's delivery, although I thought it audacious to present a no-nonsense, low-tech message in the form of an elegant online trailer. It's inspired me to give it plenty of welly – though not to try out an American accent – when reading it to my toddler.
But I was less keen on The Graveyard Book trailer, read by author Neil Gaiman. Seeing it after the fact, I felt the sharp black and white images and the scary music emphasised the creepy and murderous, the frightening, lonely side of the graveyard, while what I loved about the book was the balance of the mundane and even cosy with the supernatural and horrific. It's also very hard to argue with His Master's Voice. When it's the author reading, the trailer gets a definite stamp of gravitas.
Personally, I think I'd always rather read a teaser chapter than see a trailer for a book. But is that just my Luddite opinion? Are younger readers, particularly, increasingly going to expect trailers and respond to them in different ways? And what do you find really off-putting – or enticing – about a trailer?
