Libba Bray's 'Going Bovine': At least for her new book trailer!

If you’ve yet to pick up a book by young-adult author Libba Bray, you might after watching the trailer for Going Bovine, her smart, funny, layered new novel due out Sept. 22. The book, featured in EW’s annual Must List Issue, follows the epic journey of 16-year-old Cameron, who’s been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the human form of mad cow disease). The inspiration for the story, Bray tells EW, came many years ago, when her mother told her about a man from their hometown who had contracted the disease. “One of the symptoms that he had was hallucinations. He would see these flames shoot up in his field of vision. I was haunted by that, because I thought how horrible must it be when you can’t trust your reality. What is reality? Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not? Then it became this crazy cobb salad of all kinds of things that I’m interested in, like, theoretical physics, and microwave popcorn, and Disney World, and yard gnomes, and Norse mythology, and why are we here as opposed to why aren’t we there… or at Nordstrom?”

The trailer, featuring riffs by a cow suit-wearing Bray, is equally fantastic in its randomness. Our two favorite parts: “Boneless chicken” and “That says, to me, I’m marked for death.”