Stage Fright by Garrett Boatman

He considered himself part scientist.  After all, he had designed many of the modifications on his own machine.  But, first and foremost, he was a dreamer--the King of the Dreamies, bar none--and his mind grabbed gladly for the impossible like some kid grabbing for the brass ring on some long-ago carousel.

To create!  To birth matter from thought!

His head swelled to godlike proportions.  

The wife and I recently took a road trip from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (we road trippers call it "the You Pee") through Ottawa and Montreal to New England, stopping at antique stores and art museums along the way.  In one junkshop in Canuckistan I spotted one of the fabled Paperbacks from Hell immortalized at Will Errickson's great blog Too Much Horror Fiction and in the book he cowrote with Grady Hendrix, 2017's Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction.  Garrett Boatman's Stage Fright goes for 60 or more American dollars on the ole e-bay, but the friendly man behind the counter there in the Great White North asked only one dollar Canadian for his copy, so I took him up on it and brought this artifact of 1988 back home.  Valancourt Books in 2020 put out a new edition with an intro by Errickson that you can pick up for like 18 dollars, so the glories of its text are within your reach, dear reader, even if you don't enjoy the kind of treasure-hunter's luck that I have.

To be honest, I'm skeptical about the "glories of its text" bit.  The come-on verbiage on the front and back covers of Stage Fright make the novel sound like a 380-page joke consisting of disjointed absurdist episodes rather than a sincere thriller with a coherent narrative, and last year when I read Dana Reed's Demon Within, another 1988 paperback horror with one of these textured covers, it was pretty bad.  But I liked another Paperback from Hell, Peter Tonkin's Killer, when I read it in 2016, so you never know. According to the author's bio to be found at the back of the book among the advertisements for novels about Jason Voorhees and something Harlan Ellison endorses called Slob, Boatman is a busdriver and a Renaissance scholar, so maybe he puts his familiarity with CDL Class B vehicles and Ariosto to good use and produces here a masterpiece that will blow my mind.  Let's see.

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OK, this book is terrible.  Strike one: Boatman's prose is mediocre at best.  It has no style and Boatman shovels on the lame metaphors in an effort to add a veneer of variety to his repetitious book in which he describes the same images-- wounds and rotting corpses--and the same emotions--fear, disgust, fear, nausea, more fear, some additional fear--again and again.  Perhaps the worst metaphor comes on page 268 when Boatman tries to describe anger: "Pure, boiling anger, frustrated anger: the kind that had a head on it like a mug of beer."  Are there people out there boiling beer?  Isn't the head on a mug of beer light and insubstantial, the opposite of what Boatman is trying to convey?  Oy.    

I also don't like how Boatman uses the word "implode."

Stage Fright is also way too long, like 75 pages of material puffed up with repetition and a superfluity of description, characters and scenes to a monstrous bloated 370 pages of text!  None of the members of Boatman's horde of characters is particularly engaging--as we so often see in genre fiction, the villain of Stage Fright is the character whose motivations are the most interesting, and here even the killer is bland and boring.  Not that Boatman doesn't spend time talking about his characters; we have to hear all about each character's body type and clothing and mundane life story before he gets killed, but almost none of it registers, and few of the lives or deaths of any of these people has an effect on the novel's plodding plot and even fewer spark any emotion in the reader.  Kill scenes, fight scenes, and hallucinations go on for paragraph after metaphor-laden paragraph, Boatman giving us minute details on the look, sound, smell and feel of the torn flesh of the living and the decaying flesh of the undead but it only uses up ink and paper, producing nothing.  

A major problem with Stage Fright is that it is lazily "meta," a work of fantasy fiction about creators and consumers of fantasy fiction.  Four of the forgettable characters are pop culture obsessives who have what amounts to a science fiction fan club that prints a fanzine and attends SF cons, and Boatman stuffs Stage Fright with both direct and thinly veiled references to fantasy classics like "The Call of Cthulhu," Conan, The Lord of the Rings, Dracula, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  With sad irony these references to compelling fiction full of memorable characters undermine Boatman's own novel by emphasizing how boring his plot is and how forgettable his characters are.

Many of the scenes in Stage Fright are not real in the context of the story itself, but dreams, illusions, hallucinations, or works of fiction--Stage Fright is set in the near future when artists can directly pump sounds, sights, smells, etc., into their audiences' brains wirelessly, via microwaves, and the villain is the most prominent of such artists; besides viewing his productions we witness many of his dreams and, as he gets addicted to a drug that induces schizophrenia, his hallucinations (90% of these dreams and hallucinations are of rotting corpses and injuries.)  Much of the time reading this book is like watching a movie of a guy watching a movie.  Every time you read a work of fiction the author has to overcome your recognition that what you are reading is not real and that caring about what happens in the story is pointless, and in a book like this the author makes his job even harder by planting an additional layer of unreality between you and the scenes depicted--when the dramatic scenes you are witnessing secondhand aren't even real to the unreal people who are experiencing them first hand, so that they have no reason to take them seriously, why should you take them seriously?  

Maybe Boatman doesn't expect us to take any of it seriously.  Often Boatman seems to be playing his scenes of people being slashed, pierced, crushed, and drowning in their own blood for laughs.  Stage Fright feels insincere, at times not a legit horror story but a half-hearted inside joke about horror writers and fans.  One of the strengths of many of the writers to whom Boatman alludes is their sincerity and conviction--Lovecraft really thinks the universe is mysterious and uncaring and Howard really thinks barbarians are better than civilized men and so on.  Stage Fright lacks any sort of ideology, point of view, or argument that I could find; perhaps it is supposed to be about new media or fan cultures or sexual relationships in which women are abused, but I couldn't detect any coherent message.  Speculative fiction stories that argue for or against feminism, or socialism, or imperialism, or Freudianism, or technoptimism, or whatever, engage the reader on an additional level, provide a framework or skeleton that makes a story more comprehensible, more discrete, more challenging (if you disagree) or more comforting (if the story's ideology fits into your "safe space.")  The author's concerns and opinions tie the work to real life and contribute to and fertilize the story, help it fit together like a coherent whole and not come across as a mere jumble of scenes.  Stage Fright seems totally disconnected from real life and real concerns, and its only influences are other (infinitely more human and more creative) works of speculative fiction, leaving it incestuous and sterile, an example of cultural decadence that doesn't even  have the virtue of critiquing or lampooning its source material or the people who create and consume it.     

So, thumbs down for Stage Fright, a book which fails on every level and which was a chore to read.  Maybe The Paperbacks from Hell are not for me?  I feel like Stage Fright has less to offer than even the worst efforts of the men and women whose careers peaked or began in the pages of Weird Tales, Frank Belknap Long's incoherent late work or Robert Bloch's annoying joke stories, for example.   [UPDATE: OCTOBER 16, 2024:  Horror expert and coauthor of Paperbacks from Hell in the comments below assures us that the PfH reprints run the gamut of all horror styles, so I won't judge the line based on this sample alone--and I did like Peter Tonkin's killer whale caper, Killer, after all.]

If you want to know more about the plot and structure of this book that I just told you that I hate, and some bits of evidence backing up my criticisms above, read on below for a chapter by chapter, murder by murder, yawn by yawn summary, but if you have something worthwhile to do, like folding laundry or going to Walmart to buy Ovaltine, don't let me delay you with my complaints.

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Stage Fright consists of 33 chapters, plus an Epilogue, and is split into three parts, Paradiso, Purgatorio and Inferno, you know, like Dante's Divine Comedy, but in reverse--clever!   

In Chapter 1 we meet three cops on a boat in the Hudson River--Stage Fright takes place in Northern New Jersey, mostly within view of the Manhattan skyline, which is one of the novel's recurring motifs.  They are killed when a bloated corpse they drag out of the water comes to life and uses its preternaturally long fingernails with inexplicable dexterity to carve them up.  This turns out to be a fictional scene, part of a "dreamie," the entertainment craze of the near future!  As a two-page italics section in Chapter 2 explains, in the 1990s a Princeton scientist invented a way to transmit sights, sounds, tastes, smells and even physical sensations wirelessly directly into your brain.  When I read the text on the front and back covers of Stage Fright I thought Izzy Stark was a rock star who also had the power to raise the dead, but it turns out that in fact Izzy is the most successful creator of "dreamies"--he sits in his basement in NJ at a "dreamatron" and records his scenarios onto digital memory "bubble paks" which are played in cinemas to audiences; he also gives live performances on a portable dreamatron at live venues.

We become acquainted with much of our totally boring and mundane cast of flesh and blood people in mind-numbingly tedious domestic scenes in Chapters 2 and 3.  Izzy is keeping house with his girlfriend, college student Helen--Izzy spends so much time in the basement concocting his dreamies that he spends less time with Helen and this makes her sad.  (Though Helen and Izzy are not married they have been together a long time and she thinks of Izzy as her husband.)  Then we have four pot-smoking high school boys who make fart jokes and collaborate on their fanzine about dreamies in their clubhouse above one of their family's garage; they are looking forward to the big dreamie convention and to Izzy's Halloween concert!  And we've got freelance writer Quentin Hughes.  Quent's usual customers are audiophile magazines to whom he sells articles about stereo gear, but he knew Izzy in high school and has wangled an interview with "The King of the Dreamies"--maybe he can sell the interview to Rolling Stone or Playboy!  Boatman's prose is flat and lifeless and his characters boring at best and often irritating, and we learn trivia about them that I guess is supposed to bring them to life but is merely a waste of our time--Helen wanted to plant a garden but instead she and Izzy used the yard to play croquet, one of the pot-smoking nerds was fat but then exercised and became thin but now he is getting chubby but not quite fat.  Who cares?

In Chapter 4 Quent has his interview with Izzy and Izzy suggests Quent write Izzy's biography.  Izzy in Chapter 5 gets in touch with one of Helen's professors; this guy is conducting experiments with a drug that is distilled from the blood of schizophrenics and induces short term schizophrenia in those who take it.  Izzy has the idea of producing dreamies while using this drug, and the prof provides him some.  Izzy sits in front of the "dreamatron" in his basement, takes the drug, and composes a dreamie of a monster killing people.  Just like with the aquatic-zombie-kills-cops episode in Chapter 1, we meet (apparently) fictional people, learn about their personalities and lives, and then watch them get carved up by a monster that comes out of nowhere and has no connection whatsoever to the trivia we just learned about the characters.  A horror writer who is making an effort has a guy who is greedy get killed because he takes a risk to get money or get killed by a monster made out of dollar bills or something, has a cowardly character die because he is acting cowardly or, ironically, die the first time he is courageous.  But Izzy/Boatman goes through a lot of blah blah blah about the wife of a guy who has Alzheimer's and then a guy who is out for a walk avoiding his girlfriend and her kid from another relationship because they are annoying and then the walker gets killed by some kind of "demon bird" that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with Alzheimer's or difficult relationships.  Anyway, this gratuitous scenario is no better, no different in style or tone, from the Chapter 1 scenario--the schizophrenia-inducing drug feels irrelevant.

Chapter 6, the first chapter of the Purgatorio section of Stage Fright, is a throwaway chapter, one of Izzy's dreams, a repeat of the marine zombie scenario from Chapter 1.  In Chapter 7 we get a surprise--Mr. and Mrs. Alzheimer's are real, as was the now-dead guy with the annoying girlfriend!  Mr. and Mrs. Alzheimer's are senior citizens who were jazz musicians in the 1950s, Jason and Lois, and they live next door to Izzy and Helen with Chet, one of the guys from their band back in the day.  Izzy didn't make them up, he was just reading their minds.  So, was the giant "demon bird" a real monster Izzy was also picking up, or did Izzy actually create this monster?  There is no doubt it was real--its footprints are all over Izzy's yard, leading to the crime scene!  We readers of course assume Izzy summoned the feathered killing machine out of thin air with his thoughts, but Izzy isn't sure at first, I guess thinking it more likely that by coincidence he picked up the thoughts of a previously undiscovered six-foot tall bird living in the most densely populated state in the USA at the very moment it decided to reveal itself to the world by tearing some poor bastard limb from limb.

Chapter 8 inches forward the plot--two of the fanzine writers are going on a double date, and Jason we learn thinks he saw a thing like the demon bird on his TV last night while watching a VCR tape.  Chapter 9 sees the college prof realizing there is a connection between his giving Izzy the drug and the murder, and refuses to continue supplying Izzy; also, we get glimmers of a love triangle--Quent is developing a crush on Helen!  In Chapter 10 Izzy steals the drug from the prof's lab and starts dosing himself; this is one of the better chapters, more or less effectively describing the theft, Izzy's anxieties over the drug and his hallucinations after it begins to affect him--I would keep this chapter more or less intact in my projected 75-page version of Stage Fright.

The hallucinations continue and grow tiresome in Chapter 11, the chapter devoted to the dreamie con.  Izzy sees blood bursting out of keyholes, a spider crawling up his arm, etc.  The fanzine nerds make a brief appearance, and Izzy, meeting them for the first and only time in the entire book, thinks the temporary tattoo (a "decal") on one of these guys is alive.  In Chapter 12, Izzy, determined to see the extent of the powers awakened by the drug, comes up with a dream scenario in which living dead motorists and bikers attack one of the nerds; we get a long chase scene which ends with the nerd being propelled into the Hudson to be killed by the aquatic zombies.  If he wants to see if he can create material objects and even life through his dreamatron, why doesn't Izzy try to create something sweet and harmless, like a bunny rabbit or a Japanese schoolgirl or something, instead of murdering one of his most devoted fans?  (My 75-page version of Stage Fright would not include these four kids and their two girlfriends.)

In Chapter 13 we get another Izzy dream about the marine zombies killing him--Boatman must think (wrongly) these water zombie scenes are fascinating.  The prof calls Izzy to demand the drugs back, or he will call the cops.  In Chapter 14, Quent delivers free tickets to Izzy's big Halloween performance to the fanzine stoners' club house and learns of the motorcycle-involved death of one of their number.  When Quent passes this sad news on to Izzy, the King of the Dreamies is thrilled to have confirmation that the dreams he casts when on the drug come true, and in Chapter 15 he materializes a squad of metallic pursuers and a tentacled monster and sends them after the college professor.  In Chapter 16 the student the prof is having an affair with finds the prof's corpse.  Helen touches one of the digital memory "bubble paks" that stores Izzy's dreamies and she has disturbing visions of his horror scenes.  Boatman is inconsistent in describing Helen and Izzy's relationship; she is shocked to see these gruesome scenes, but later we are led to believe she is intimately familiar with all of Izzy's work which  of course consists of nothing but such horror scenes.

(We'll just look past the idea that Izzy taking a drug has somehow changed the performance of digital equipment.)

The sixteenth is a long chapter full of content as well as turgid irrelevancies.  Boardman tells us something he should have told us earlier which makes Izzy's motivations a little clearer.  I didn't notice that the drug-induced dreamies were superior in narrative to the aquatic zombie dreamies, but we are told that while on the drug Izzy can record a dreamie more quickly and efficiently.  Also in Chapter 16, we have to endure a sentimental love scene between Lois and Jason, who sing a little ditty from their hey day 40 years ago to each other.  (Popular music is an occasional theme of the novel; there are references to Pink Floyd and ? and the Mysterians' "96 Tears." ) Jason comes to visit Izzy to ask if perhaps his work on the dreamatron has anything to do with the strange images that appear on his TV when he watches his videotapes of old SF movies like Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers--Izzy now realizes what we readers have known for a while, that when Izzy records his drug-fueled dreams, the ones that kill people, some of the signal is picked up by his neighbor's TV!  Jason lets on that Izzy is not the first person to whom he has mentioned this phenomenon--Jason has an appointment to meet with a physicist at Stevens Institute of Technology later today to talk about it!  Chapter 17 follows the Alzheimer's-afflicted Jason as he gets lost in Hoboken after his meeting with the physicist, which he has already forgotten about.

Izzy strikes Helen after she asks him if drugs are the reason he has been acting odd lately, and she leaves him in Chapter 18.  Chapter 19 focuses on the love triangle among the musicians; Chet has been carrying a torch for Lois since the Eisenhower years, and we are provided a scene in which sexagenarians Chet and Lois look deeply into each other's eyes and the treacherous Chet gets an erection while groping Lois' breast; while they are laying together the Creature from the Black Lagoon climbs out of Jason's TV set and crushes Jason's skull so his two eyes appear to be looking into each other.  This whole kill scene is sort of played as a joke, ending with:

Jason Carrugathers died so quickly he had no last thoughts.  Only an extremity of terror and pain...

And then, nada.

(I haven't seen any of the Creature from the Black Lagoon movies since I was a kid--is there a scene in which a character says "nada"?) 

In Chapter 20, Helen is back in the Hoboken neighborhood in which she grew up; her parents still live here, but she is too embarrassed by the black eye Izzy gave her to see them so she wanders the streets, getting lost and then pursued by a monster!  We see how Izzy, sitting at the dreamatron, can look through the monster's eyes as well as Helen's, even sense Helen's fear.  At first the monster is uninspired, the silhouette of a tall man, but then Izzy and Boatman get a little more creative.  Helen is trapped in an alley by a hovering naked teenaged girl--the ghost or wraith of Helen's sister who died when they were teens!  (Too bad Boatman never mentioned this dead sister before.)  A swarm of insects erupts from the girl's mouth and a snake slithers out of her privates, and Helen is about to be submerged under this tide of creepy crawlies when Izzy has a pang of conscience and the monsters vanish.  (This scene, the one genuinely disturbing horror image of the book, would make the 75-page cut of Stage Fright; I would also add a scene early in the story in which Helen, instead of thinking about a garden, would recollect how her now dead sister loved insects and reptiles and kept them in their shared room despite Helen's objections.) 

In Chapter 21 the battered Helen arrives at Quent's to advance the love triangle business and discuss the obvious connection between her nightmarish ordeal and Izzy and his dreamatron.  This chapter also includes what might be an inside joke: in an interview, Quent raises the topic of critics who say Izzy's plots are tired and derivative, and Izzy defends himself; does Boatman identify with Izzy and endorse Izzy's defense, or is the hack Izzy a satire of hack horror writers and maybe even Boatman poking fun at his own derivative hackery?

In Chapter 22 we experience another Izzy dream (no aquatic zombies this time, thank God) and hear all about the physical (constipation, vomit) and psychological (paranoia, hallucinations) effects of his addiction to the schizo drug and his memory of striking Helen.  As the chapter ends he is looking at a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings for inspiration for his next dreamie.

Chapter 23 is the first chapter of the Inferno section of the novel and starts with a description of the weather on October 29 and 30; heat and humidity become a recurring motif of the remainder of the book.  We are also told in so many words that Izzy, at his Halloween performance, is going to cause some kind of mass casualty event--370 people will die!  In this chapter Izzy suffers many more hallucinations of death, corruption and contamination, so much so that he can't eat and sews himself a mask to hide from himself the reflection of his own face.

In Chapter 24 the physicist, Quent, Chet, and Lois sit and talk and begin putting together the pieces of the puzzle that show that Izzy is the killer.  Paranoid Izzy is watching from his window and assumes they are conspiring against him.  Chapter 25 starts with Quent talking to Helen, relaying the new info from the physicist and the musicians.  Amazingly to Quent, Helen wants to get back with Izzy, to help him--even after he hit her she is standing by her man!  

The second part of the twenty-fifth chapter brings the stoner fanzine nerds back into the story with a description of their feelings after the funeral of their friend.  For some reason, Izzy tries to murder one of them with a gang of black-clad Vietcong types with vampire fangs and fingernails, but the nerd has taken LSD to deal with the grief of losing his friend and this gives him the power to fight the "gooks" with the "leathery yellow faces" (I wonder if the 2020 Valancourt edition keeps this verbiage--remember the differences we found in different printings of Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller Live and Let Die?) in hand-to-hand combat, and Izzy in his basement feels the blows of the tripping young man's fists and combat boots and lets him go.  Izzy suffers further setbacks in Chapter 26 as he attacks Lois and Chet with winged demons and the animated corpse of Jason!  Chet has a .22 rifle and shoots some of the flyers but then has a brainwave and shoots the electrical line into Izzy's house next door--when Izzy loses power, the demons and zombie vanish.

Chapter 27 feels disjointed and gratuitous; it stars Izzy but doesn't mention the attack on Chet and Lois nor any power outage.  Most of it describes, in tedious detail, the hallucinations of decaying of corpses that Izzy sees, material this book already has a surfeit of.  Was this chapter originally someplace else, or written after the rest to raise the page count and then inserted in the wrong place?

In Chapter 28, at the request of Chet, the physicist constructs, in mere hours, a device to jam a dreamatron; Chet plans to use it to sabotage Izzy's big concert in Jersey City at midnight on Halloween.  But when Quent and Chet get to Stevens they find one of Izzy's monsters has killed the scientist and trashed the place.  (I guess Izzy's power is back on?  Maybe the attack on Chet and Izzy is another scene written later and clumsily added to pad the word count of this monster?)

Boatman starts Chapter 29 by telling us the theatre where Izzy's midnight Halloween concert takes place will burn down, the cause of the fire unknown.  Chet and Quent brazen their way past security into the theater.  Chapter 30 describes the start of the performance.  Helen is in the audience, and in a different part of the theatre are two of the fanzine stoners; since one of their cronies is dead and the other has chicken pox, they have been able to bring girlfriends with them.  One of these chicks will live to regret this date, as some of her fingers will be severed in the course of the evening.  Izzy conjures up a squadron of flying monsters the nerds recognize as Nazgul from The Lord of the Rings to attack the audience.  The floor of the theatre collapses, though I think that is just an illusion, part of the dreamie.  The audience members find themselves on a rocky plain obscured by smoke and inhabited by monsters of many types.  The monsters are real, I guess, because many people are killed by them, though it seems the smoke is part of the dreamie.  

In Chapter 31, Quent arrives at this "hellscape" and sees many people being killed by a variety of creatures; Boatman tells us the scenario is derivative of Bosch multiple times--this guy is reluctant to type anything once when he can type it three times.  Quent recognizes the cliffs around the perimeter of the setting as being based on the Palisades.  Like Quent, Helen, from a hiding place, watches and listens to people getting killed.  Driven from her hidey hole, she is attacked by a monster and is about to be killed when Quent spots her and directs at Izzy an image of himself slaying Izzy with a sword, disrupting Izzy's concentration and saving his unrequited love.  

Chapter 32 is a particularly long and boring chapter that starts with Quent trying to convince Helen to help him defeat Izzy by using her imagination in concert with his, and failing because Helen has battered wife syndrome and wants not to harm Izzy but somehow help him.  Then we get two long and drawn out fight scenes that feel interminable; a hand-to-hand fight should feel fast but Boatman gives us paragraph after paragraph describing every sword stroke and each ounce of oozing blood and every permutation of people's feelings as they veer between fear and hope and lards these fights with lots of dopey jokey dialogue.  These fights move at glacial speed, and even if the gore--monster dismemberments and decapitations and girls' legs gashed so they gush blood--was disturbing or the fighting thrilling--which they are not--Boatman's bargain basement jokes would defuse any tension the blood and monster mutilations might generate.  One of the fights involves the nerds and their girlfriends (one of the girls shows her breasts to attract an undead ogre's attention, the other loses a contact lens in the excitement) and the other involves Quent who uses his imagination to turn his pen knife into a fire sword with which to fight minotaurs whose blood is fire.  (Always with the fire.)  Quent and Helen reach Izzy's plateau and Izzy summons a rain of blood, which is neutralized by Quent's sword, which, being powered by imagination, can do anything from healing Helen's leg to acting as an umbrella.  Izzy then triggers an earthquake which sends Q and H tumbling down into a blood-filled chasm.

Rather than some kind of climax, Chapter 33, the final numbered chapter, feels like more of the same, more descriptions of rotting corpses and injuries as the nerds fight monsters and are killed or maimed and Quent and Helen use their imaginations to navigate a labyrinth and fight monsters.  The long labyrinth scene is a total waste of time because Quent and Helen just end up back at Izzy's plateau again.  Izzy hits Helen in the face, knocking her off the plateau, which is sort of interesting because it plays into the whole battered wife thing; the final fight between Izzy and Quent that follows is terribly lame.  When Izzy is incapacitated (whether he is dead or just unconscious is kept from us) the illusions vanish and firefighters arrive to drag the three members of the I-A-Q love triangle out of the burning theatre which is full of burned corpses.    

We jump forward like 18 months for the Epilogue.  Izzy, we learn, has been in a coma since Quent outfought him and for months has been in the custody of the CIA who are conducting experiments on him and developing a new synthetic version of the schizophrenic blood drug in hopes of coming up with a new weapon for use against the Red Army should the god damned commies bust through the Fulda Gap.  Dreamatrons have been outlawed.  Chet and Lois married and retired to Florida where they have started a band at their retirement community.  Helen is still in love with Izzy and has lawyers trying to get the King of the Dreamies out of the hands of the CIA.  Quent is still in love with the unachievable Helen, but he has gotten rich and famous with his book on Izzy.  After wasting our time with the pot-smoking fanzine crew all through the book, Boatman simply neglects to inform us as to how the survivors of their tragic little band are doing.  Maybe these dorks were added to a later draft and Boatman forgot to wrap up their fates in the epilogue he had already written?