Views from Vauxhall

A Novel

To Whom It May Concern,

I have written a book, and it is now published and ready for purchase. It can be found here and here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLJT7C56

Below, you will find the preface in its entirety.

Any and all reviews are welcome.

Cheers.

TRE

Preface

This book was conceived during a time of mass hysteria and personal loss. It was the fall of 2021: my father had passed away in July, and the end of our collective sanitary tedium did not seem to be near.

At that point I had lived in Charleston, South Carolina for a year after having moved from Richmond, Virginia. I did not know anyone who could call themselves a local here. I was mostly alone, and what little company I shared could not be called interesting. I was unemployed, underemployed, barely scraping by. But I had an appetite, as one tends to acquire here. So, I wrote a book—this book—and published it in the fall of 2022. Not too many weeks later, after having personally bought a few copies for friends and family, I removed it from purchase.

It was not ready then—maybe it isn’t now. But after accruing a small readership, after making great and bright friends, and after having looked the book over on a whim since March 2026, I’ve decided it could be worthwhile to release it in this latest form.

To begin, Views from Vauxhall is not a short story collection—it is a unified whole. What makes these nine chapters coherent is the structure, that being a chiasmus, and the narrator. The book reverberates to and from the center.

This is a book about the particular. Nothing more. It takes place in Charleston, a town known for its particularity. There is scrutiny of the hollow verbiage of the advertisement cloaked as a travelogue; there is ridicule, perhaps too harsh, of the food writer and his desperate attempts to imbue a sense of sub specie aeternitatis into a beef carpaccio; there are thefts of classical forms, taking inspiration from the great well of our inheritance. However, it does not seek to loiter with the mummies. It hopes to make them new, to re-present them again in however poorly executed an anamnesis this may be.

Having gone on enough, I will end by explaining the title. Vauxhall was once a pleasure garden here in Charleston at the northeast corner of Broad and what is now Legare. Alexander Placide, a French acrobat, dancer, actor, tightrope walker, and theatre impresario, opened it in the summer of 1799. There he hosted suppers cold and hot, firework shows, and even an exotic animal display, including an elephant. In 1821, after his passing, his widow sold the plot to the Right Reverend Dr. John England, Bishop of Charleston. There, just across the street from where I live, stands Saint John the Baptist Cathedral. I suppose there is some poetry in that.

I want to thank my dear friend Patrick Erdmann for his innumerable revisions and advice. To the reader: forgive me the formatting, I know not what I do.