"This book is a beautifully written, streetwise evocation of the '60s, told with uncommon grace and clarity of vision. Author Bruce Boston writes with the voice of a poet, the heart of a bodhisattva, and the unblinking eye of an investigative reporter. He creates a realistic, unsentimental rendering of an era slipping rapidly into the mists of history.
Set against the backdrop of the East Village poetry scene circa 1965, Stained Glass Rain chronicles the confluence and divergence of four lives: Jacobi, college dropout and ex-track star, arriving in New York from California with 200 hits of acid; Michael, "poet and poetaster," dancing on the fulcrum between self-absorption and self-realization; Christine, fleeing from mainstream America and the constraints of privilege; Mulligan, joker, fool, catalyst.
Boston weaves the paths of their lives into a seamless tapestry that captures both light and shadow, hope and delusion. And, in so doing, he illuminates some of our collective consciousness."
—Wired Magazine
"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
"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, "Hard Magic, Soft Science"
"the same reading pleasures most of us find in science fiction, while also delivering the goods we associate with the finest lyrical realistic fiction...Rain is that rarest of novels, one so steeped in its milieu, one whose author has so deeply remembered/imagined his characters and period, that the reader is effectively given the controls of a technicolor time machine."
—Paul Di Filippo, Asimov's SF Magazine
"captures the spiritual technology of an age which is becomingfable...a repository of hope, madness, dream and reality ...atrue history of a mythical time."
—Don Webb
"Tell a good story and the world will listen. Boston tells it in away that theavant-garde and the straight world will both find compelling."
—Ed Sanders,
"wonderful...affords not only recollections of the psychedelic sixties, but insights into all of us at the dawn of the twenty-firstcentury."
—Robert Anton Wilson,
"Cosmically great, right up there with Craddock's Be Not Content and Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly."
—Rudy Rucker,
"This book is beautiful, it's a classic that you've never heard of. Not a single word is wasted on the weight and the depth of the characters."
—Amazon review
"how believable the descriptions and characters are, how the tale presents itself with such utter tangibility that it comes closer to true life experience than fiction. Seldom have character portraits been painted with such detail—so alive are they in the mind that to close the book and thus wipe their souls from the reader could surely be considered some kind of murder...It is a remarkable feat of penmanship."
—Good Reads review
