Addicts Basements edition by Robert Vaughan Literature Fiction eBooks
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"Drawing its energy from society's underbelly-the dim corner booths of bars, the stalls of public bathrooms, the thickets of unkempt parks-Vaughan's book is part prose poem, part fractured sonnet, part Whitmanian love-cry. 'What were your last thoughts, Ophelia? Were / you loved enough? Will I ever know when I am?' When this poet speaks, we are compelled by the plaintive urgency of eros in his voice. On the edge of a low-lit Interstate highway somewhere between Los Angeles and New York City, Addicts & Basements yawps and pivots and veers, praising its own wreckage." -Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men
Addicts Basements edition by Robert Vaughan Literature Fiction eBooks
While waiting for clothes to dry in a dingy, low-maintenance laundromat—leaning beside an out-of-service soda machine was a discolored Fisher-Price Playset (in case anyone wanted to conveniently scare/scar the hell out of their kids)—I tore into Addicts & Basements, Robert Vaughan’s slim collection of brisk, tightly-constructed miracles of human endurance both humorous and sad (often beautiful), as coin machines, some entirely gutted, struggled haphazardly against insurmountable odds:A man is mailed his ex’s pubic hair; a lonely waitress perusing personal ads becomes smitten by Bondage Man; a father kidnaps two siblings who may or may not be his kids; and a husband surfs porn sites while wearing his medicated wife’s panties.
Vaughan’s talent in handling the plights of characters many would write off as pathetic grotesques is masterful, and he does it with love and sincerity:
He decided to give it a whirl in the toilets of Grand Central Station. He stopped by Wigs and Plus on 14th Street where the owner, Sunny, would sell him a cheap piece “for his mother.” Then he’d prop himself in the furthest stall from the door every Sunday morning. Wig in place. Like a parishioner. Or a TV evangelist. Or a congressman.
When it comes to flash fiction (those brief, punchy, not-quite-prose-poems) Vaughan is an upper-level video game boss. “Gauze, A Medical Dressing, A Scrim,” with its impeccable comedic timing, might be one of the best I’ve ever read. “Neighbors,” about two suspicious pet owners, isn’t too shabby either:
He likes her smile, imagines seeing those guinea pigs ripped into shreds. He untangles the leash. “C’mon, boys.” He imagines what she looks like covered in whipped cream. Even her heels. They keep laughing.
“On the Wings of a Dove” turns the nightmare juice up to 11 with Vaughan’s haunting tribute to Matthew Wayne Shepard, a young man tortured and killed by homophobes in Wyoming:
his coma was so quiet,
one of the killers would
later say, you could almost
hear ice rattling down the canyon
In crazy-good snapshots like “What Some Boys Do” and “There’s No Place Like Home,” Vaughan voices the concerns of children growing up in whack-ass situations (rickety Fisher-Price Tragi-sets not withstanding):
And Dad, if you can call him that, he’s still screwing Tonda, our pastor’s daughter. She’s only a year older than my oldest sister. That’s gross. And then there’s my brother. He won’t leave me alone. Some nights I sleep on the garage roof just to get away from him. Even the dog is constantly horny, humping the closest leg around. So embarrassing.
Sexual discovery, especially through imprisonment and abuse, is a common theme throughout Vaughan’s work:
I was tied-up in a harmless game
of cowboys and Indians,
I discovered it was the only
way for me to
feel aroused. No, to
feel anything.
He goes for broke, even when s*** gets creepy:
I made sure it was the same Santa as last year. Yup. The one who smelled like Crown Royal, like my Daddy used to. And I made sure I was the last one to sit on Santa’s lap. Well after the elves had all been released for the day. After Santa blew me on the present wrapping table, and wiped up.
The laundromat was mercifully closing. Addicts & Basements was finished and tucked under my arm as I went to fetch the clothes I’d hoped were dry (they weren’t). The owner rolled in a mechanized mannequin, some bizarre promotional monstrosity used to attract/scare off business, dressed in Keds and a purple wig. There was a car battery strapped to it legs. The wig was slightly askew. I couldn’t think of a better book than Addicts & Basements to have with me at that moment—amongst those pitiful machines, this deranged wonderland, that mannequin. Only Vaughan could make any damn sense of it.
Review originally published @ HTMLGIANT.
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Addicts Basements edition by Robert Vaughan Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Word sketches etched over scar tissue, reflected in mirrors of memory and regret. Beautiful and raw; this author finds his muse beneath the heart's faltering habits. Still, it beats.
Vaughan has such an ear for tone, for flow. I think of people at 2am just drunk enough to whisper the urgent gossip to another that was never supposed to have been spoken. Vaughan constantly manages to surprise, as well as make me laugh...and often other things. These pieces all have masterful voice and zing home with an impressive amount of power.
Addicts and Basements, a marvelous full length collection of poems as flash fiction or flash fiction as poems is a batch of psychically sharp writing that is at once awash in shadow, beguiling, unusual, mysterious and revelatory. Vaughan unspools verse in mass quantity, stacking each passage on a previous gemlike passage, all the while leading the reader farther away from familiar touchstones and deeper into the infinite reward of the strange, out of the ordinary, even at times super natural. Hypnotic. Maze-like. Bio-luminescent. Utterly crushing. Transformative.
A solid collection of free-form poetry & flash fiction, filled with dark humor and strange mystery. Most of the time, Vaughn leaves us with only an inkling of the story, and the rest is filled in again and again by our anxious imagination. From the utter fantasy to gritty realism, Vaughn shows us clips of his worldview and covers a lot of ground. I'm looking forward to a full-length work by him, which will probably take us to some pretty strange, but eerily familiar, places.
Robert Vaughan explores addictions and the dark crannies of basements in his collection, Addicts & Basements, which assembles a variety of his works from flash fiction to poetry. There’s a disturbing symmetry in the obsessive nature of the characters, each piece a syringe of distorted desire injected directly into the nerves of the brain to disrupt synaptic cohesion. Vaughan’s words act as amphetamines and depressants, a lyrical brand of verbal inhalants that capture moments, sometimes brief, sometimes interminably addictive.
Oddly beautiful. Touches of irony and nostalgia in sordid settings, all told in a distinctive voice. This is a book I will keep close to me for a long time.
Favorites
The Femur
Cowboys and Indians
Crossing Himself
Virgin Mary Toting a Winchester
Hummingbirds
Nine Shutters of Snow
The Farrow Heart
Chubby Chaser
Flip of A Coin
Lost and Erasable Parts of Us
A Wonderful Life
"Addicts & Basements" has people incapable of leaving their situations due to addictions, or people who have left but find they have taken a basement full of baggage with them. Robert Vaughan does not judge or even seem to pass an opinion. He illustrates in a style more sumi-e than Rockwell. Sometimes he gets so close, so intimate with the subject that one is unsure what exactly one is looking at. The book encourages much rereading and reconsideration, the way one might look closely and this way and that at a cropped Polaroid or a microscopic photograph. One of my favorites is "Hummingbirds", a prose poem in four sections informing us that, “hummingbirds represent the number eight, infinity. Their wings flapping so quickly they create this symbol.” Vaughan’s poems are such hummingbirds tiny, discrete, and sometimes hard to see because of the paradoxical and uncommon maneuver of pulling in close to spring a release onto an expansive view. The effort is worth it. Highly recommended.
While waiting for clothes to dry in a dingy, low-maintenance laundromat—leaning beside an out-of-service soda machine was a discolored Fisher-Price Playset (in case anyone wanted to conveniently scare/scar the hell out of their kids)—I tore into Addicts & Basements, Robert Vaughan’s slim collection of brisk, tightly-constructed miracles of human endurance both humorous and sad (often beautiful), as coin machines, some entirely gutted, struggled haphazardly against insurmountable odds
A man is mailed his ex’s pubic hair; a lonely waitress perusing personal ads becomes smitten by Bondage Man; a father kidnaps two siblings who may or may not be his kids; and a husband surfs porn sites while wearing his medicated wife’s panties.
Vaughan’s talent in handling the plights of characters many would write off as pathetic grotesques is masterful, and he does it with love and sincerity
He decided to give it a whirl in the toilets of Grand Central Station. He stopped by Wigs and Plus on 14th Street where the owner, Sunny, would sell him a cheap piece “for his mother.” Then he’d prop himself in the furthest stall from the door every Sunday morning. Wig in place. Like a parishioner. Or a TV evangelist. Or a congressman.
When it comes to flash fiction (those brief, punchy, not-quite-prose-poems) Vaughan is an upper-level video game boss. “Gauze, A Medical Dressing, A Scrim,” with its impeccable comedic timing, might be one of the best I’ve ever read. “Neighbors,” about two suspicious pet owners, isn’t too shabby either
He likes her smile, imagines seeing those guinea pigs ripped into shreds. He untangles the leash. “C’mon, boys.” He imagines what she looks like covered in whipped cream. Even her heels. They keep laughing.
“On the Wings of a Dove” turns the nightmare juice up to 11 with Vaughan’s haunting tribute to Matthew Wayne Shepard, a young man tortured and killed by homophobes in Wyoming
his coma was so quiet,
one of the killers would
later say, you could almost
hear ice rattling down the canyon
In crazy-good snapshots like “What Some Boys Do” and “There’s No Place Like Home,” Vaughan voices the concerns of children growing up in whack-ass situations (rickety Fisher-Price Tragi-sets not withstanding)
And Dad, if you can call him that, he’s still screwing Tonda, our pastor’s daughter. She’s only a year older than my oldest sister. That’s gross. And then there’s my brother. He won’t leave me alone. Some nights I sleep on the garage roof just to get away from him. Even the dog is constantly horny, humping the closest leg around. So embarrassing.
Sexual discovery, especially through imprisonment and abuse, is a common theme throughout Vaughan’s work
I was tied-up in a harmless game
of cowboys and Indians,
I discovered it was the only
way for me to
feel aroused. No, to
feel anything.
He goes for broke, even when s*** gets creepy
I made sure it was the same Santa as last year. Yup. The one who smelled like Crown Royal, like my Daddy used to. And I made sure I was the last one to sit on Santa’s lap. Well after the elves had all been released for the day. After Santa blew me on the present wrapping table, and wiped up.
The laundromat was mercifully closing. Addicts & Basements was finished and tucked under my arm as I went to fetch the clothes I’d hoped were dry (they weren’t). The owner rolled in a mechanized mannequin, some bizarre promotional monstrosity used to attract/scare off business, dressed in Keds and a purple wig. There was a car battery strapped to it legs. The wig was slightly askew. I couldn’t think of a better book than Addicts & Basements to have with me at that moment—amongst those pitiful machines, this deranged wonderland, that mannequin. Only Vaughan could make any damn sense of it.
Review originally published @ HTMLGIANT.
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