Broken Bulbs [2007] - Eddie Wright

"You. Are. Not. Nothing."

Frank Fisher is nothing. He wants to be something. When a mysterious young woman named Bonnie offers assistance by injecting seeds of inspiration directly into his brain, Frank finds himself involved in a twisting mystery full of addiction, desperation and self-discovery. Broken Bulbs, a novella by Eddie Wright, tells the story of the lengths one young man will go in the pursuit of "something."

Broken Bulbs is a brilliant and stunningly original work, by far the best novel I read in 2008. Technically, I suppose, Broken Bulbs would be classified as a novella since it runs just 132 pages and I read it in about an hour or so. Fast-paced, energetic and totally eclectic, Broken Bulbs reminded me of a quote from William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch: "I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body—after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless smell of death . . ." In Broken Bulbs, the horrors of drug addiction and total despair collide with blunted creative aspirations, destroyed hopes and fear of failure on a twisted road leading to self-discovery. 

If you truly enjoy reading the latest, force-fed pabulum that can be found on The New York Times best seller list, stay the hell away from Broken Bulbs. However, if you welcome the challenge of tackling something totally authentic, surreal, disturbing and existential (and yes at times downright weird!), I strongly recommend Broken Bulbs. Where else can you find a stream-of-consciousness narrative full of references to such diverse subjects as A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, Peter Brady, Norman Bates, Albert Einstein, Iggy Pop, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Woody Allen, as well as a demented mailman and six-foot-tall hamster wearing a suit (not kidding!).

I particularly enjoyed many of the great creative passages such as "The seeds grow beautiful trees with endless fruits of creativity dangling from the branches just waiting to be plucked but instead I let them fall to the ground and die. Sometimes I take them. Sometimes I take them and bite them and they taste wrong. They taste bad. They taste like poison. They taste like pain."

Ironically, the last three months have been a creative black hole for me. Day after day, I would sit around and write down ideas on scraps of paper and file them away as I soon got distracted by mindless pursuits. Wasted hours, unfocused, staring at a blank computer screen and then reaching for a bottle of cheap wine or glued to the TV watching a bunch of worthless crap. And so in the end I felt just like Frank Fisher, I am Frank Fisher . . . Aren't we all?

"There's nothing like that millisecond when thoughts and feelings and dreams and creativity and pride pile on top of each other to form a mountain of hope that you can climb to overlook all the shit that cloud your existence. But there's also nothing quite as horrifying as the inevitable fall that comes when you realize that you've been standing on false hopes, broken dreams and idiotic, unrealistic thoughts and you plummet right back into the middle of all that shit and it's worse than you remember. There's nothing quite like nothingness."    

Broken Bulbs is Eddie Wright's first book. I am definitely looking forward to reading his next one. For more information on Broken Bulbs, visit the Broken Bulbs MySpace Page.