Double Feature by Owen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.



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