Legends of the Metasphere: A Collection of Speculative Fiction and Mythic Adventures (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781412098533)

Joseph Kerrick spent several years in what he described as "the magical universe." The physical coordinates were Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, home to a whole conjeries of visionaries and wizards, trippers and mystics, colorful street people and hardcore crazies. The adventure culminated for Joseph in 1985 with an event that he experienced as an apocalyptic transformation, and was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a psychotic episode. Whichever way you interpret it, the result was that he went back to his loved ones, raised his son, and integrated his strange experiences into life as we know it on planet Earth. Like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, his recovery took decades but the difference is that along the way Joseph used the fruit of his psychotic adventures to create hauntingly beautiful fictional stories, which have attracted a small but enthusiastic readership in the alternative press and on the World Wide Web over the past twenty years.