The Last Projectionist Summer
A Novel

About this book:

The smell of hot ozone, vinegar-scented acetate, and fifty years of dust clings to seventeen-year-old Julie like a second skin. It's the summer of 1998 at the Starlight Drive-In, where two Century 35mm projectors wheeze against obsolescence, the screen leans two degrees toward the east, and the concession stand has twenty-four cans of generic cola left—forever. Her father refuses to concede the double feature; her mother has already counted the final inventory. Between the moths diving into popcorn and the xenon lamps burning through cash they don't have, Julie operates the changeover cues, rides the brake on a slipping tension spring, and watches her parents' marriage flicker frame by frame.

In a Nebraska flatland where the multiplex in Lincoln steals the blockbusters and the air-conditioned crowds, *The Last Projectionist Summer* loads a love letter to analog decay into the gate. Here, splicing black leader is a sacred act, a tin-can rattle in the exhaust fan is a heartbeat, and every car pulling onto the gravel is a vote against the dark. Julie knows the booth better than her own bedroom, but she's never had to choose between keeping the light on and letting it go—until the night the distributor cuts the lead-in short, the hot dog buns never arrive, and the storm rolling off the cornfields threatens to tear the screen down for good.

Rich with the grease-and-grace texture of a vanishing craft, this is a novel about the machinery that holds memory, the family business that breaks your heart, and the single summer when the final reel spins out. For anyone who has ever sat in the dark waiting for the beam to catch, *The Last Projectionist Summer* delivers the last picture show you'll never forget.