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    Double Feature: A Novel
    Double Feature: A Novel
    Double Feature: A Novel
    Audiobook16 hours

    Double Feature: A Novel

    Written by Owen King

    Narrated by Holter Graham

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 19, 2013
    ISBN9781442360532
    Author

    Owen King

    Owen King is the author of The Curator, Double Feature, and We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories. He is the coauthor of Sleeping Beauties and 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 family.

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    Reviews for Double Feature

    3.5/5

    62 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Going to be honest here, I didn't expect to like this. Yes, it's the OTHER (read: non-Joe Hill) son of Stephen King and it was pushed as a "hilarious" novel. Okay, it's not hilarious. But it is, among other things, amusing, touching, smile-inducing, poignant, meandering and frustrating. At times I felt it was closer to J.K. Rowling's A Casual Vacancy than anything. But bottom line? I quite enjoyed it.
    • 2/5
      Not my flavor.
    • 4/5
      Owen King's pacing, the back and forth of the story between episodes that formed the narrator's directorial career, his father's own somewhat more successful career, I thoroughly enjoyed all of it.When it begins to dawn on Sam that his film has been destroyed by Brooks I felt the visceral tug at the guts and as the stakes ratcheted up, even though you *knew* what was going to happen (and you do, now, now that you've read this... spoiler!), you knew it wasn't going to end well. But, like a socket wrench, the magnitude of the problem, the sheer loss Sam's going to experience, and you with him, it gets worse, then a little worse, then worse still until something breaks and we get catapulted to 1969 and Booth's nascent career.It's a pretty full book, full of characters, some of whom echo a little more realistically, some of whom (like Booth at his most bombastic, but fully in keeping with his character, or the Internet listicle celeb roommate of Sam's) don't. Like I said, I really enjoyed the pacing and the shifting gears between one story and the next, one perspective and the next, particularly Sam's mother, Allie's story. While the early section is fraught with tension regarding the ultimate fate of Sam's film, the remaining sections, the long weekend sections, still roil with their own little sub-dramas and I had a good time riding out the rest of the story with these folks.
    • 2/5
      So this author is surrounded by writers in his real life. His wife Kelly Braffet is an author I have read and liked, his Brother Joe Hill's books have been fantastic, his mother Tabitha King is an author, and then of course there is his father Stephen King. So the fact that Owen King decided to be a writer, is really no surprise. What was a surprise was how boring this book was. If you are going to write a book with quirky eccentric characters and a less than conventional storyline like a John Irving, or Wally Lamb book the writing has to be interesting, and pull the reader in from the start. This book has all kinds of creative writing gimmicks- a paragraph that lasts for multiple pages, a plot line within a plot line within a plot line, etc, the problem for me was I didn't care about anyone in the book. I felt like there was an inside story I was not privy to, like an inside joke, and I was looking in but would never be made part of the group. Yes the author can write, but for me the subject and the characters were just one dimensional and not at all interesting.
    • 3/5
      Slow start. It seems to be attempting to be 'too real' to be real, but maybe that's the point. The second half of the book is much better. Keep reading.

      Also, I hope I don't ruin anyone's experience, but I couldn't get Bruce Campbell out of my head as the character of Booth Dolan.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this book. An excellent first novel. Although Sam Dolan is in his twenties, the theme as definitely coming-of-age. He has a father problem. Booth Nolan is a "B" actor, with a waning career of portraying fabulist con men - a combo of W. C. Fields and Henry Higgins. His portrayals have earned him a cult following. Booth's marriage and relationship with his children mirror the characters he often portrays -charming, but careless. His essential goodness manages to continue close friendship (with some benifits) with Allie his first wife who didn't really want the divorce. Known for his on-the-road infidelities, Booth meets a woman he also also loves. He displays some character divorcing Allie, deciding he can't have both. Even after the marriage ends, they stay friends and occasional lovers. Why am I going on about Booth? Well - while Sam's resentments are justified, his father's shortcomings are pretty much Sam's. Self-centered neglect is one of the apples falling close from Booth's tree. Sam hates his father, or at least thinks he does. The plot centers around a movie Sam makes on campus with lots of sub-plots and high jinx. It all resolves with a party that could be out of a Woody Allen film with a little farce included. I don't want to spoil it for likely readers. But I will tease you with the quality of Owen King's writing:"Sam [with Polly] sipped his hot chocolate. It was delicious. ... On the exterior of one of the City Bakery's large street-side windows, a diminutive vagrant dressed in an oily overcoat, blond beard tangled and matted, talked and gestured sharply with his hands, though there was no one near him. As Sam observed the unfortunate's conversation with the air, he concluded that the affair with Polly was another sort of pantomime. It wasn't helping her or him; it was just what they were accustomed to doing. The vagrant's overcoat billowed in a gust of wind, and he spun, flailing at the garment, as if he didn't realize he was wearing it and thought it was chasing him. Sam sipped again. Maybe the chocolate was a tad acrid"
    • 1/5
      I really wanted to like this because I enjoyed his first book. However, I have to at least be able to tolerate the main character and Sam didn't work for me. I'll try his next book as well, hoping that this is just a "one on" and I'll enjoy the next book.
    • 4/5
      I can picture it on the big screen…I’m nothing so pretentious as a cinephile; I’m a movie-lover. So, I think, is debut novelist Owen King. But the young protagonist of Double Feature, Sam Dolan, is very much a cinephile and a freshly-minted graduate of film school. As the non-linear narrative opens, Sam is about to start filming the script that was his college thesis. The first third of the novel involves the shooting of this low-budget, indie feature film and the aftermath of that film’s creation. It affects Sam’s life in long-lasting and unexpected ways. Beyond this, Double Feature is about Sam’s complicated relationship with his father, Booth, a deeply flawed and aging B-movie actor. One passage:“The story was undoubtedly an exaggeration if not an outright fabrication. Booth had been in the business of cheap entertainment for so long that he had gone native. In his telling, everything was a sensation, a shock, a crisis, a betrayal, amazing bad luck, or an unforeseeable confluence. When Sam was younger, his father had let him down. Now that Sam was older, his earlier self’s stupidity mortified him: how could he have expected anything else from a man who relished any opportunity to tell strangers that his infant son looked like a leper? Booth’s fallaciousness was right there all the time, as inherent as the nose on his face.”It’s bold—Bold I say!—when you’re Stephen King’s son, to publish a debut about a young artist with major daddy issues. Readers tend to read into these things. But I can’t honestly say that I believe Mr. King is working through any issues of his own. Still, he may have some insights into being the child of a celebrity that most of us don’t. I mentioned above that the novel is non-linear. It moves in time from the opening when Sam is in his early-twenties, back to his parents’ courtship decades earlier, forward to the altered life of Sam’s early thirties, and many points in between. I’m a big fan of this type of story-telling when it’s done right. It’s an interesting way to make revelations, often with answers coming before questions are even asked. Mr. King did manage this device well, for instance, eventually supplying the additional information on Sam’s mother that as a reader I actively craved. As you can see from the quote above, his use of language is sophisticated. This is not the type of macabre commercial fiction that his father and brother trade in. This is a satirical dramedy, and yes, it’s definitely funny, though not generally in a laugh-out-loud way. Both the characters and the events of the novel have a heightened quality about them, not exactly mirroring real-life, but intentionally so. King has created a fantastic and entertaining assortment of supporting characters. This is one case, however, where I don’t feel that the novel’s jacket copy does them justice or really describes the story accurately. What can you say? No one wants to be guilty of spoilers.Double Feature is an accomplished debut, but I do have a few criticisms. I felt that both the novel’s beginning and ending were especially strong, but things slumped a bit in the tale’s middle. Further, there are plot developments that occur that are so unbelievably obvious to the reader that it’s hard to credit that Sam can’t see the big picture as easily as we can. It’s true that when you’re living in the moment, these things generally aren’t as obvious, but it still stretched my credulity.That said, the novel’s plotting was especially impressive. King juggles quite a few literary threads and manages to bring his story full circle in a notably satisfying manner. It’s truly difficult not to develop affection for this loony cast of characters. And one more treat… Do you stay to the very end of films’ credits like I do? Sometimes there’s an “Easter egg” at the very end. This may be the first time I’ve seen a literary Easter egg after a novel’s acknowledgements, but it’s awesome. It’s the perfect way to end this tribute to the magic of movies.