IT'S THE DOCUMENTARY THAT FOUND A BOOK HIDING INSIDE OF IT!

By Paul C. Bastante, Author of "Preakness", Release Date: November 27th, 2026

The Documentary That Found a Book Hiding Inside It

I didn’t set out to write a book about a horse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWtlFHJ_sCI

In 2018, I made a documentary called “Hills & Valleys A Journey Through Wayne, N.J.", about the town of Wayne, New Jersey — its history, its people, the layers of a place most folks drive through without a second thought, but wherein great history has taken place.

The inventor of the delicious creme filling that you find in the middle of an Oreo Cookie, Mr Sam Porcello, lived in Wayne, N.J., Queen Latifa and Tom Cruise both lived in the township. And the father of our country, George Washington himself was shacked up with Alexander Hamilton at The Dey Mansion on two separate occasions.

But everywhere in the research for that film, I kept running into a name that didn’t belong to a single street or park, but to something bigger: Preakness. The section of Wayne that is largely taken for granted. 

So much so in fact that, pronounce the word phonetically (PREEKNESS) in front of someone in the know or a long time resident and you will be corrected post haste. After all, everyone knows that it is pronounced like the word BREAK…BREAKNESS…PREAKNESS!

Each year around April of each year you begin to hear them talk about the second jewel of The Triple Crown, The Preakness Stakes race and pronounce it like the former. 

Most people know the word from the second leg of the Triple Crown. Almost nobody knows though that there was an actual horse named Preakness — bred and raised in Wayne, New Jersey — and that the second-biggest race in American horse racing has been carrying his name for over 150 years without most fans ever learning why.

That’s the kind of detail that stops you mid-project. And it did me! 

I remember sitting with it, half-convinced I was missing something obvious — surely someone had already told this story. But the more I dug, the more I found gaps. Fragments in old newspapers. A name attached to a place, but no throughline connecting the horse to the town to the race to the legend.

The documentary had a runtime. This story didn’t fit inside of it.

So, I kept pulling the thread after the film wrapped. What started as a stray research rabbit hole turned into months of digging through historical records, then years of shaping it into something readable — not a dry historical account, but the actual story: how a horse from Wayne, New Jersey became the namesake of one of the most famous races in the world, and why almost nobody knows it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjym9LaiAxM

That’s the catalyst. Hills & Valleys was supposed to end with a finished film. Instead, it left me with a question I couldn’t put down — and Preakness, the book, was the answer. Eight years in the making, transcending 53 years in the mid 1800's and grinding its way across five countries to a finish you will never forget.

That was 2018 and I have been writing and writing and writing Preakness with the fever of major sport athletes and the effort they put in in the dark, when no one can possibly see.

Preakness releases November 27, 2026 — Black Friday. It’s been a long road getting here, and I couldn’t be more ready to finally put this into readers’ hands.

One more thing I can share now: we’ve been in talks with GiantDog Books on publishing rights and a signing. Nothing finalized yet, but there’s more to come on that soon — stay tuned.

If you’ve ever found a footnote that turned out to be the real story, you know exactly the feeling I’m describing.