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. ( )

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. ( )

Not my flavor. ( )

Ok, Owen King, I see what you did there. You made Sam's life mirror his film, with his own life going off the rails & becoming something uncomfortably close to mental illness for a good chunk of time. Then you resolved his decade-long issues in one long weekend, like the characters of Who We Are were supposed to resolve 4 years in a day. And that's clever.

You wrote a complete novel - complete with missing scenes, a budget for the fictional novel, an interview with the fictional father - with a lot of imagination & humor, encompassing a lot of themes. It was an ambitious undertaking, & not half-bad.

But there WERE some things left incomplete, or maybe they just weren't enough. Like Sam himself. It took me a long time to care about Sam - all the way up to his realizing what Brooks had done to his film. And you had me there: I cared, I really wanted to know what came next for him. But then you lost me. It was depressing enough that his talents were wasted on being a weddingographer; realizing that he was such a prick that he didn't deserve much more than that was a disappointment. Nothing feels real at that point: married Polly & her jock husband are caricatures; a NYC woman in her 30s willing to chase down a guy who literally fled from her is NOT real; a guy in his 30s who will stand on an old man to flee out a bathroom window shouldn't even exist in anyone's imagination. If this were a farce, all is fair. But it's not.

I've heard that you insist this father-son relationship is not at all autobiographical. I don't know anyone in the King family, or anyone who can claim to know any Kings, so I have no reason to doubt that. Except this: your father claimed that he didn't realize he was writing books that were making connections to each other, that were building a whole world with a long history. So maybe you're writing some things you don't realize, too. That's okay, & not really my business, unless the reason your story is incomplete is because your understanding of what you're writing is, too. If that's the case, then I just ask that you figure it out, for the sake of the next book.

Because I really want to like you, on your own merits. As debut novels go, this was ambitious, & successful enough. So I will read the next one. I can live with imperfect characters - they're only human, right? I just want to be happier for the main character when he's at a party that brings his whole 30 years together in a touching way than I was for Sam. That's all. ( )

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. ( )