Double Feature

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.

Twins Payton and Emma are off to Hollywood to star in a TV commercial but nothing goes as planned and it may take a twin switch or two to help things work out.

THE MOVIE STAR AND THE MOVIE CRITIC -- HOW FAR WOULD THEY GO TO KEEP THEIR SECRETS BURIED? DOUBLE FEATURE Contains two CLASSIC Donald E. Westlake novellas, A Travesty and Ordo. WHAT'S HIDDEN BEHIND THE SILVER SCREEN? In New York City, a movie critic has just murdered his girlfriend - well, one of his girlfriends (not to be confused with his wife). Will the unlikely crime-solving partnership he forms with the investigating police detective keep him from the film noir ending he deserves? On the opposite coast, movie star Dawn Devayne - the hottest It Girl in Hollywood - gets a visit from a Navy sailor who says he knew her when she was just ordinary Estelle Anlic of San Diego. Now she's a big star who's put her past behind her. But secrets have a way of not staying buried... These two short novels, one hilarious and one heartbreaking, are two of the best works Westlake ever wrote. And fittingly, both became movies - one starring Jack Ryan's Marie Josée Croze, and one starring Fargo's William H. Macy and Desperate Housewives' Felicity Huffman. "A book by this guy is cause for happiness" - Stephen King

After a film director dies in a mysterious fire, there is more than one side to the story of his life. Movie director Leland Granger sought acclaim his entire life, but only achieved his goal after his death. His sole feature film is released posthumously, and his daughter Debby pens a biography to establish her father's status as an auteur, despite the efforts of those, she contends, who undermined him. However, Leland's longtime friend Paul Garvey sees things differently. Paul levies his judgment upon the biography, while sharing his perspective on the man he had known since college, when he was just the asthmatic, eccentric Leon Grossman from Milwaukee. While Debby's sensationalist, pretentious tell-all, The Celluloid Umbilical, is widely panned and revealed to be largely fictional, Paul provides particular insight into her flights of fancy, having been present at many of the events she describes. His motive in debunking Debby's book isn't simply devotion to the truth or his friend's memory-he's defending himself and others against the character assassination she undertakes, which goes so far as to implicate him in the fire that killed her parents. The narrative is a deliciously sarcastic tale, packed with Hollywood history told from an insider's viewpoint, but the language is often too clever for its own good. Wolfe throws himself wholeheartedly into his novel's conceit, even supplying numerous footnotes citing Debby's fictional biography and those of other figures involved, as well as an index. But the meta-fictional premise, which brings Paul Auster to mind, isn't quite sufficient enough to sustain the reader's interest for 300 pages. The book ultimately ends with an unsatisfying whimper. Adding to the post-modern resonance, Double Feature has been published posthumously; Wolfe, a longtime Hollywood writer, died in 2007. A Hollywood whodunit told in compelling, if at times verbose, style.-Kirkus Discoveries

A young man comes to terms with his life in the process and aftermath of making his first film, in particular with his relationships with family, friends, lovers, and adversaries.

Critical discussion of cult cinema has often noted its tendency to straddle or ignore boundaries, to pull together different sets of conventions, narrative formulas, or character types for the almost surreal pleasure to be found in their sudden juxtapositions or narrative combination. With its own boundary-blurring nature - as both science and fiction, reality and fantasy - science fiction has played a key role in such cinematic cult formation. This volume examines that largely unexplored relationship, looking at how the sf film's own double nature neatly matches up with a persistent double vision common to the cult film. It does so by bringing together an international array of scholars to address key questions about the intersections of sf and cult cinema: how different genre elements, directors, and stars contribute to cult formation; what role fan activities, including con participation, play in cult development; and how the occulted or bad sf cult film works. The volume pursues these questions by addressing a variety of such sf cult works, including Robot Monster (1953), Zardoz (1974), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Space Truckers (1996), Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004), and Iron Sky (2012). What these essays afford is a revealing vision of both the sf aspects of much cult film activity and the cultish aspects of the whole sf genre.

This whopping big McFarland Classic brings together 43 interviews with horror and science fiction movie writers, producers, directors and the men and women who saved the planet from aliens, behemoths, robots, zombies, and other sinister, stumbling threats--in the movies, at least. The interviewees reminisce about some of their great (and not so great!) films and tell their stories. This classic volume represents the union of two previous volumes: 1994's Attack of the Monster Movie Makers ("anecdotes are frank and revealing"--Video Watchdog); and 1995's They Fought in the Creature Features ("a fun book for all SF film enthusiasts"--Interzone). Together at last, this combined collection of interviews offers a candid and delightful perspective on the movies that still make audiences howl and squeal (though fear has long been replaced with sweet nostalgia).

A woman visits a haunted castle, and two friends share tales of the supernatural in these two gothic novels featured in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the main character, Catherine, receives a reading list of gothic novels. Once thought to be fabricated by Austen, these novels were rediscovered in the 1920s and are now referred to as the “Northanger Horrid Novels.” Two of the Northanger Horrid Novels, The Castle of Wolfenbach and The Necromancer, are presented here as A Northanger Double Feature. With hidden identities, damsels in distress, creepy castles, and villainous Counts, The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) is a showcase for the gothic genre. The story follows the beautiful Matilda as she escapes unwanted advances, braves the haunted castle, and attempts to find safety, and maybe even love, all while being pursued by her murderous uncle. The Castle of Wolfenbach is Eliza Parsons’s most famous novel and an important foundational work in the gothic genre. The Necromancer (1794) is by far the strangest of the Northanger Horrid Novels. The story begins with two friends, Herman and Hellfried, passing a stormy night by exchanging supernatural stories. The weirdness continues to unfold through a series of letters. The work is an example of the gothic genre’s use of framing narratives surrounding first person accounts from multiple characters. The Necromancer takes this trope to staggering heights by nesting multiple narratives inside each other. The resulting stories are a bizarre collection of violence and supernatural shenanigans centered around the mysterious Valkert, who is rumored to have returned from the dead. Both of these stories are amazing examples of early gothic works and can be enjoyed as such for fans of the genre or read as a companion to Austen’s Northanger Abbey./