Double Feature: A Novel - Softcover

King, Owen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451676905 ISBN 13: 9781451676907

Publisher: Scribner, 2014

Synopsis

“An ambitious and warmhearted first novel” (Entertainment Weekly) from Owen King—the epic tale of a young man coming to terms with his life in the aftermath of the spectacularly bizarre failure of his first film.

SAM DOLAN is a young man coming to terms with his life in the process and aftermath of making his first film. He has a difficult relationship with his father, B-movie actor Booth Dolan—a boisterous, opinionated, lying lothario whose screen legacy falls somewhere between cult hero and pathetic. Allie, Sam’s dearly departed mother, was a woman whose only fault, in Sam’s eyes, was her eternal affection for his father. Also included in the cast of indelible characters: a precocious, frequently violent half-sister; a conspiracy-theorist second wife; an Internet-famous roommate; a contractor who can’t stop expanding his house; a happy-go-lucky college girlfriend and her husband, a retired Yankees catcher; the morose producer of a true-crime show; and a slouching indie-film legend. Not to mention a tragic sex monster.

Unraveling the tumultuous, decades-spanning story of the Dolan family’s friends, lovers, and adversaries, Double Feature is about letting go of everything—regret, resentment, dignity, moving pictures, the dead—and taking it again from the top. Against the backdrop of indie filmmaking, college campus life, contemporary Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Owen King’s epic debut novel combines propulsive storytelling with mordant wit and brims with a deep understanding of the trials of ambition and art, of relationships and life, and of our attempts to survive it all.

About this title

Review

Guest Review of Double Feature

By Dave Barry

Dave Barry has been a professional humorist ever since he discovered that professional humor was a lot easier than working. He has written more than 30 books, including the novels Big Trouble, Lunatics, Tricky Business and, most recently, Insane City – his first solo adult novel in more than a decade!

I’ll be honest: The reason I agreed to review this book is that Stephen King asked me to. For 20 years Steve and I were members of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band consisting mostly of authors with severely limited musical talent.

Steve and I have spent many hours standing on a stage, enveloped in a thick thudding cloud of noise, frowning at each other’s guitars, each of us trying to figure out what specific chord the other guy was playing. We have also sung together on both “Teen Angel” and “Surfer Bird.” When you go through experiences like that with another person, you become friends.

So when Steve asked me if I’d consider reviewing Owen King’s first published novel, Double Feature, I said “Of course!” But I also said, to myself, “Uh-oh.” My concern was: What if I hate it? I’d still have to give it a nice review, even though that would totally compromise my integrity.

But then a really fortunate thing happened: I remembered that I have no integrity.

No! Seriously, the fortunate thing that happened is this: I read Double Feature. And I didn’t hate it. In fact I really, really liked it. I liked it so much that it sort of pisses me off – the fact that Owen King, who is something like 142 years younger than I am, is such a skilled, imaginative and complete writer. This is a well-wrought and thoroughly satisfying novel, which manages, at the same time, to be both moving and – this is what pisses me off the most – very funny.

It’s the story of a melancholy young man named Sam Dolan. Sam is the son of Booth Dolan, a career B-movie actor who always, when performing, wears a false nose (he has two suitcases full of them). Booth is big-hearted, shrewd, spontaneous and a wondrously flamboyant raconteur; many people love him. Sam, however does not: Booth has been a seriously unreliable parent, and a faithless husband to Sam’s mother, Allie (who loves Booth nonetheless, as do I, and as will you).

Sam is estranged from his father, but not the movies. We meet him as a film student determined to produce and direct a movie he wrote called Who We Are, which is financed in part by a wealthy but weird fellow student named Brooks Hartwig Jr. With heroic effort, Sam manages to get his movie made, only to discover that Hartwig has destroyed all the prints but one, which he has transformed into an entirely different, totally bizarre movie starring a spectacularly well-endowed college janitor who, among other things, has sex with a tree.

His dream dashed, Sam drifts away from filmmaking. When we see him next, eight years have passed, and he’s earning his living making wedding videos. We learn that the mutant version of Who We Are has, to Sam’s enduring anguish, become a big cult hit, a kind of X-rated Rocky Horror Picture Show that hipsters gather to mock-worship.

Sam can’t get away from the movie, and he can’t reconcile himself to its success. He can’t accept anything good happening to him, and therein lies the heart of the plot, which I won’t divulge further except to say that it is skillfully executed and never predictable. The characters are brilliantly quirky and non-generic, and (I’m saying this again because you really need to know) the story is just wonderfully, organically funny.

Owen King has a gift. I don’t know where he got it. But I can’t wait to read what he writes next.

About the Author

Owen King is the author of the novel Double Feature and We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories. He is the coauthor of Intro to Alien Invasion and the coeditor of Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories. He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, the writer Kelly Braffet, and their daughter.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1451676905
• ISBN 13: 9781451676907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448