Stage Fright by Garrett Boatman

Monsters from a sociopath's imagination

Stage Fright is a Cronenbergian horror novel centered around an invented technology which is commonplace in its fictional world.

Dreamies are like movies. People go into darkened theatres and sit huddled together in the darkness whilst they are transported into some alternative reality. Except dreamies require no screen; instead, the sights, sounds, smells, and even tactile sensations are projected directly into the audience’s heads through the use of radio frequencies calibrated to those precise areas of the brain that receive such sensory information.

The effect, then, is that when someone experiences a dreamie, they actually are experiencing it. It’s not like watching a film or even playing a video game. You are literally in the mind of a character doing, feeling, and reacting as if you were them.

Naturally, one of the most popular genres of dreamie is horror. Plenty of people love getting scared out of their minds by a horror dreamie — it is the ultimate thrill ride. The king of the horror dreamie is Izzy Stark, and it’s he who is the center of Stage Fright.

Izzy is constantly looking for new ways to terrify his legions of fans, to push the envelope, to do something utterly new that no-one has ever done before with a dreamie. His work might be preoccupied with the disgusting and disturbing, but he is first and foremost an artist.

Inspiration hits upon discovering the paintings of famed schizophrenic artist Louis Wain — and simultaneously of experiments being conducted by a local scientist who uses an isolated form of taraxein (a hallucinogenic drug made from the blood of schizophrenics).

Izzy connects with the good doctor in the hopes of using taraxein to create a new wave of horror dreamies and together they experiment with the substance. Sure enough, the nightmares Izzy produces under its influence are extraordinary… but these bad dreams don’t just stay inside his head. Somehow, the awful things he imagines become utterly, physically real.

Izzy is a mad doctor who grows increasingly unhinged. He becomes addicted to taraxein and the pursuit of creating his masterpiece: the dreamie to end all dreamies. He turns increasingly pyschotic; turning on his wife, his friends, even his hordes of adoring fans.

Stage Fright is wildly imaginative read featuring all sorts of creepy villains. There are undead biker gangs, underwater zombies, killer human-bird hybrids, and plenty more besides.

But it is also, at times, a demanding read.

There is a sprawling cast of characters in addition to Izzy: there’s his wife, his former friend-turned-biographer, his elderly neighbors, two professors, and a bunch of teenage friends who worship at his alter of the macabre.

At numerous points throughout the book, chapters commence with several paragraphs that intentionally obfuscate the character in question in a disorienting manner which further underscores the book’s blurring of fiction and reality, not to mention its focus on mental disorders. (In addition to Izzy’s descent into madness, one of his neighbors is suffering with dementia; a condition only made worse once Izzy’s nightmarish creations become flesh — and the reality he was already struggling to comprehend slips ever further from his grasp.)

Whilst there is plenty in Stage Fright to spark the imagination and satisfy the cravings of paperback nasties readers, the novel is for the most part a dark tragedy: it is the story of a misunderstood individual with a sinister mind who grows increasingly isolated and evil. It’s not quite at all what I was expecting but it is deeply unsettling and left me with a book hangover for days after finishing.