Eddie Wright

Eddie Wright is one of my GoodReads friends. He sent me an email asking me to buy a copy of his bk & to review it. Ordinarily, a review copy wd be sent free to the reviewer. Regardless of that, I looked at the bk's GoodReads page & decided I'd give it a shot. I bought it & then wrote Eddie asking him to do the same for me w/ my bk "footnotes".

NOW what? It's potentially a big responsibility to review a 1st bk by a writer. I cd take the easy way out & give the bk a 5 star glowing review - thusly probably making Eddie happy & possibly insuring a good review of my own bk. &, thankfully, I LIKED "Broken Bulbs", so I'm not faced w/ considering writing a highly critical review out of honest 'necessity'.

INSTEAD, I find my self facing a slightly more complicated middle ground. I'm tempted to give "Broken Bulbs" a 4 star rating b/c I did enjoy it, it was written w/ substantial skill, & I did find it a 'compelling' read in a similar way that I've found bks by some of my favorite pulp writers compelling - writers like Dashiell Hammett or Philip K. Dick. But, no, it's a bit closer to Rudy Rucker or Jonathan Lethem. & I doubt that Wright wd be offended by these comparisons - given that an advertising review on the back of the bk reads: "philip dick wd be proud.".

This is a novel about attempting to be something, about attempting to be inspired, about being in love, about addiction. Some of these are, perhaps, somewhat reminiscent of Dick's "A Scanner Darkly". HOWEVER, this novella doesn't quite reach the profundity of detail & despair & imagination that Dick's novel does. Wch isn't to say that it's 'bad'! Far from it. It does mean that it's a bk by Wright, NOT by Dick, et al.. - As it shd be!

In fact, there were a few turns in the novel that were writerly enuf to invigorate my attn & stir my admiration. I particularly liked the scene where the young boy (I don't want to be too spoiler-specific here) reads his short story to his class.

"Broken Bulbs" is written in varying subtly interwoven & inter-related voices. A part of the joy of reading it is having these relations revealed. Older pulp novels typically had a structure where one narrative thread is left hanging at the end of one chapter to be replaced by another narrative thread left hanging - at wch point the 1st is returned to, etc.. "Broken Bulbs" is a product of an age where such a propelling strategy is no longer sufficient - instead, it's more of a meta-narrative - where the propulsion is kept going by different levels of fictionalizing - & this strategy is quite successful.

All in all, I think this is a very good 1st novella & I'll certainly read more by Wright as it, hopefully, comes along. It is, though, a FIRST novella & Wright has, most likely, greater things in him. The language here is quite good but it remains to be more fully developed. As such, I refrain from giving it a star rating. If I were to rate it a 4 star bk, I wd be giving it credit due to more practiced writers, if I were to give it a 3 star rating, I might seem to be insufficiently enthusiastic. A 1 or 2 star rating wd be too low, a 5 star rating wd be too high.

At any rate, this story will speak to many people who're struggling to make something out of their life & who're grasping for inspiration in ways that aren't always the healthiest, eh? & Wright tells the story well.… (mehr)

I think I've actually read this novella before, because parts of it gave me some strong déjà vu. Evidently I forgot I'd read it, probably because I didn't think it was very good. It reminded me a bit of "Donnie Darko", although I don't remember that very well so take that comparison with a grain of salt.

Mostly I didn't get what the point of this book was. It didn't tell an interesting story, but it didn't seem to have any other point. Let's hope I don't inadvertently start reading it a third time!… (mehr)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I have a varying amount of tolerance for so-called "bizarro" literature, because of so much of it being so zany and non-narrative, essentially a written version of a cartoon with no stakes or consequences and thus difficult to get engaged in or care about what happens. And Eddie Wright's newest novel, Korsakoff Blight, is a bit guilty of this too; but thankfully he turns in a more grounded story than most other bizarro novels, one that at least has a coherent plot and real-feeling characters doing real-feeling things. It's the tale of our eponymous hero, a frustrated writer whose life suddenly gets more complicated with the death of his father, also named Korsakoff Blight and who turns out to have been living just a few doors down from Korsakoff Jr. for years, despite his parents being divorced and his father having no communication with him since he was a child. It's while exploring this house that Korsakoff Jr. has just inherited that he starts stumbling across stranger and stranger details -- a hidden room in the basement, a half-finished detective/philosophy novel -- and as more and more of Korsakoff Sr.'s acquaintances start coming out of the woodwork, enveloping Korsokoff Jr. into a surreal conspiracy theory involving alt-realities and mind-erasing designer drugs, Korsakoff Jr. loses more and more of his grip on what's reality and what's dream, experiencing what's either blackout periods that last literally for years or perhaps jumping back and forth in the space/time continuum itself.

It's a small and interesting story that's easy to read yet packs in a lot of deep thoughts, basically David Lynch crossed with Paul Auster and wrapped in a Road Runner cartoon; and while that's certainly not going to be everyone's cup of tea, this is well worth the time of those who enjoy the fringe edges of genre literature, and especially those who like stories that messily mesh together weird tales with science-fiction. It comes with a hearty recommendation today to those specific people, although others can safely skip it with the knowledge that they're not missing out on much.

Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for fans of bizarro lit… (mehr)