The Crystal Well

By Marshall Flamm

The Crystal Well is a story of great ambition, hard work, dogged patience --- but of ultimate failure. This is the lot of the protagonist who awakens to find himself in a strange realm where the toll exacted for failure is harsh and everlasting: to be banished. There is injustice in this: the protagonist is branded a failure not because he shirked his task or was slipshod in performing it or that its resolution was ludicrous or banal; but rather because what he completed well and honestly was deliberately destroyed by a vindictive member of his own family. The sole redeeming feature of this appalling event is that a young boy finds an intact fragment of what the protagonist had made and the boy is so enthralled and beguiled by it that it imbues him --- years later when he is a man --- with the inspiration and incentive to follow in the protagonist's path, and succeed gloriously where his predecessor had failed. The story, too, is a saga of the march of generations, and of the conviction that Striving's seed is never truly lost or wasted or destroyed, and that buried dormant in time and darkness it may burst forth years later far away in a shower of light.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1450500900
• ISBN13: 9781450500906
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.2" x 5.3"