"Bert, the director of an unorthodox TV commercial, aims to canonize a serial killer as a viable culture hero. Pudd, the serial killer in question, has delivered up his last days to the machinery of pseudoreligious conversion on institutional terms. And Joyce, the quintessentially "difficult" patient combating her fatal disease on any terms but the real ones - all seek the Answer through creation. Each strives to bring forth his or her unique take on what is real through defiance of what the authorities - medicos, the media, men of the cloth, market analysts and academics - deem so."--BOOK JACKET.