The Double E

by Matt Briggs

In the shadow of the Boeing plant where the first commercial jet liner was assembled, a family lives in a house in a rural landscape filled with stumps, streams chocked with the dead salmon, and no one who can help. The sixties in Renton, Washington were a mix of jet age technology and subsistence farming. Roger Carnation at an electrical engineer, or double e, is a stepfather who regards his new family as an acquisition. He has daughters to train to do what he needs. He has a wife to clean house and prepare food. He has a son to train as a replacement man. The novel is told through the five points of view as the story advances toward its inevitable end.

238 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2013

About the author

Matt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs’s zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest."