Stained Glass Rain [Hardcover]

Bruce Boston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1993

"_Stained Glass Rain_ is as image dense and metaphysically jam-packed as any acid trip. Yet for all the very accurate descriptions of hallucinatory experience, this book is no more nostalgia trip.... Like LSD itself, the sixties have been demonized and beatified but rarely have they been humanized as fully as in this novel." --Howard V. Hendrix

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This self-styled "novel of the sixties" traces the fortunes of a quartet of bohemians as they take fledgling steps into the new psychedelic counterculture. David Jacobi, in his early 20s, fancies himself the new Kerouac but lacks the requisite imagination. Even in his alternate incarnation as an apolitical LSD dealer he is merely a dilettante. His friend Michael Shawtry is an ascetic poet who rejects his family's wealth to follow a mixed-up philosophy created by his own isolation. The third member is Christine Leslie, 10 years older than the others, also a poet from a wealthy family. Jacobi has been intrigued by her since discovering they both used the same metaphor, "stained glass rain," in their poetry, and soon after meeting, the two become lovers. Rounding out the group is Mulligan, who travels from Berkeley to spend a few weeks in New York with his pal Jacobi and to play Cassady to his Kerouac. Lack of plot and focus mar poet Boston's ( Cybertexts ) first novel, and its most mature and thus most interesting character--Christina--is short-changed in the narrative, while numerous descriptions of acid trips and half-baked philosophies prove tiresome.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"...the best novel yet written about the sixties and its drug culture." -- Howard V. Hendrix, Tangent

"...the reading pleasures most of us find in science fiction ...the goods we associate with the finest lyrical realistic fiction." -- Paul DiFilippo, Asimov's SF Magazine, July, 1995

"Boston writes with the voice of a poet, the heart of a bodhisattva...the unblinking eye of an investigative reporter." -- Daniel Marcus, Wired, March, 1995

Product Details

• Hardcover: 460 pages
• Publisher: Ocean View Books; 1st edition (December 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0938075306
• ISBN-13: 978-0938075301
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,289,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Three-time Bram Stoker Award winner Bruce Boston is the author of forty-five books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener's Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His fiction and poetry have appeared in hundreds of publications, most visibly in Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase. In addition to the Bram Stoker Award, Boston has received a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He lives in Ocala, Florida, with his wife, writer-artist Marge Simon. For more information, you can visit his website at http://www.bruceboston.com/.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 60s realism, December 4, 1999

By 

jon poley (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stained Glass Rain (Hardcover)

Boston has provided us with an uncannily accurate feel for the 60s, a decade of emergence, fueled by drugs and individualized anarchy

As in his poems, Boston creates very palpable imagery that helps place the reader in the midst of the characters for a realistic journey into one of the most important decades of the century

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Intense and Illuminating Journey, June 5, 2006

By 

Malcolm J. Deeley - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stained Glass Rain (Hardcover)

Bruce Boston's "Stained Glass Rain" achieves something very rare: a richly layered, unsentimental evocation of a period (the 1960's counterculture movement) that is so often populated with archetype and caricature in the rearview mirror of time. It is a knowing journey through the lives of its characters that goes far beyond the surface zeitgeist of that time. Boston, who is also a remarkable poet, weaves a spell that balances clarity and delirium, intensity and peace, that can literally lift you from the pages. The four central characters, wildly disparate in personality and history, form one of those brief circles in life where you are brought strangely and vividly alive, learning more about yourself than you could have dreamed, before flaw, strain, doubt, and the inevitable subtle wounding that comes from opening up too much takes place, and the circle begins to splinter. A powerful and important book, that will challenge your mind and senses, and will reward serious reading with the deepest sense of satisfaction.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New York City in the '60's, March 26, 2002

By 

Gary O. Clark (Davis, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stained Glass Rain (Hardcover)

I've read various novels dealing with the Sixties, Brautigan et al, but most were West Coast oriented. Boston's novel is East Coast. Now the times and stimulation were similar, but I think the East Coast version was little darker and more intellectual. Kind of East Village vs. Haight Asbury, the former already brimming with counter culture lore and history. Boston's book is intelligently and poetically written, but is not a quick read. This is serious literature, but as others have pointed out, a more accurate snapshot of the Sixties, not to mention a very entertaining one.