An Artist's Life

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Brent Dalgreen, a celebrated painter dying from moon radiation, returns to Earth desperate to discover what art can still mean before time runs out. In the Metropolitan Museum, a single unsettling landscape stops him cold: it does not merely depict the Moon, but somehow captures its emotional alienness, the very truth Brent spent a year in lunar exile trying and failing to master. That shock sends him hunting for the artist, Arthur Di Costa, whose work seems to reveal a depth of feeling no ordinary painter should possess. When Brent visits Di Costa's elegant home, the polished domestic surface only deepens his unease. A portrait of Marie seems to mirror the woman herself, and the arrival of her daughter exposes a painful family secret beneath the refinement. Suspecting Di Costa is not entirely human, Brent follows him through New York and into a hidden underground chamber, where a bizarre wall, a mind-affecting device, and a red-haired woman who knows his name lead him into a revelation beyond science fiction. Earth, he learns, is an alien sanitarium, and Di Costa's genius comes from buried memories of an otherworldly childhood. In the end, Brent is not destroyed but sent to another planet, where he may live on and paint on a truly alien canvas.