Mr. Chesbro has been thinking about and working on Prism on and off for more than twenty years, after working for more than two years, seven nights a week, as a night security guard in a lounge/night club---and that experience isn't even covered here. (That time period will be covered in Volume Two, "Pieces of Night," assuming you, the fans, are interested in Volume One and that Mr. Chesbro ever gets around to it.)

I had the pleasure of proofreading Prism a few months ago, and I think you'll all enjoy the book. The true aspects of the story make for tough reading in many places---Mr. Chesbro doesn't try to hide the negative aspects of his fictionalized life here---but it's a very touching book that helps to explain the toll that writing fiction can take from an author.

What can prompt an author to write of "the events that led him to pursue the 'darkest and most difficult of the arts,' the writing of fiction?" Patrick notes: "I've always admired Chesbro's novels for their originality and sheer strangeness, but this latest work quite frankly touched me down at the core. Prism is an intensely personal compassionate examination into the mind of a writer, Garth Fugue, who for 40 years has managed to keep his demons at bay through the craft of fiction. Approaching 60, he suffers a crisis of the spirit: his literary career is floundering, his health is in a steady state of dcecline. Through his work teaching the most difficult and dangerous patients in a children's psychiatric hospital where, as a damaged man, he tried to help equally damaged children, Fugue/Chesbro must grapple with his own lifelong emotional pain and struggles with the questions that plague us all: mortality, purpose, meaning, stc. An astonishing achievement."

Comments by Patrick Millikin, The Poisoned Pen, February 2002.