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GREENSBORO — Brian Ray’s small apartment near Guilford College is nearly empty.
 

There’s a chair and two laptop computers near his size 11 running shoes, his bookcase and his clean laundry stacked on a kitchen shelf.
But not much else.
 

He sleeps on an air mattress near his free weights in his bedroom and keeps in his refrigerator the staples needed for any 27-year-old living on a tight budget: a half-eaten pizza, a carton of milk, a few beers and a box of instant mashed potatoes.
 

He’s frugal. He’s hoping for a tenured teaching job at some university. Until that happens, he’ll teach a few undergrad courses at UNCG as he works on snagging his doctoral degree in rhetoric and composition by 2012.
 

But he’ll also write. And he does that well.
 

A year ago, he beat out 100 other submissions and won South Carolina’s inaugural First Novel Prize from the S.C. Arts Commission. He pocketed $1,000. But more importantly, he got his book published.
 

It’s been published by Hub City Writers Project, a nonprofit out of Spartanburg, S.C., that tries to showcase the South and its traditional, layered, incredibly quirky culture through the literary arts.
 

And Ray’s book is a good pick.
 

It’s a coming-of-age novel about a teenage artist named Sarah West who works in her dad’s steel mill, falls in love with an after-midnight muralist and grapples with the death of her artist mother named Monday.
 

It’s funny, poignant and dark in a Tim Burton kind of way. And maybe it should be.
 

Ray listened to the soundtrack of Burton’s film “Sweeney Todd’’ constantly as he created on his laptop Sarah’s life in Columbia, S.C. He lived on coffee, worked way past midnight and revised his manuscript at least two dozen times.
 

How else can you invent a guy who lives in an abandoned prison, hardly ever sleeps and spends his nights painting huge murals where he works: a steel mill where the insides “glowed like thunderheads full of lightning.’’
 

But Ray’s book is also an intriguing window into mental illness, an often misunderstood disease that affects one out of every five American families.
 

Ray gives you a front-row seat with every turn of the page.
 

Monday, Sarah’s mother, needs medication to stay sane. If not, she’s out there — “an unwound ball of yarn, tangled and sprawling, and dangerous.’’
 

Ray knows of what he writes.
 

He’s had relatives dealing with mental health issues commit suicides. And he’s had a college roommate with an anxiety disorder and dated girls whose moms suffered from manic depression.
 

So, he gave mental illness a personal spin in his first published work. He’ll talk about it tonight at Greensboro’s Barnes & Noble.
 

You can see it in his title. That is, if you ask. Ray plucked a line from “The Haunted Palace,” a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a talented yet mentally unstable writer who more than 150 years ago called himself mad.
 

Ray’s title? “Through the Pale Door.’’
 

“Everywhere I turned, mental health was staring me in the face,’’ Ray says from his apartment. “And I’ve always felt writing is exploring, and writing gives you a sense of control behind the clinical studies I found in books.
 

“But when I’d read them, I’d feel dissatisfied,’’ he said. “Not that my book gives any answers. But it is a way of looking at it, a way of understanding it, a way of talking about it with a family member or friend.’’
 

A few weeks ago, Ray went back to Columbia, S.C., his hometown. And there, in a coffee shop near his alma mater, the University of South Carolina, he caught up with an old friend from high school.
 

She had read “Through the Pale Door.’’ She later told Ray it gave her an “emotional hangover.’’ But it also gave her a chance to tell Ray, a longtime friend, about her mother.
 

Her mother had a multiple personality disorder. Ray never knew that.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com