Realists

by Conrad Bishop, Elizabeth Fuller

A cross-genre comic tale in the Kurt Vonnegut as a third of America goes clinically insane, hot-tempered Eddie sparks up an edgy romance with Pepper, a tough single mom from Oklahoma. His complaint about a phone bill targets the duo as terrorists, and a motley group of losers, loners, and seekers are tangled with their fate. Can love survive the snaggle-toothed jaws of Armageddon?

The War on Drugs has morphed into a War on Dreams (escapist! pornographic! traumatic to children!), with suppressant dosages plunging America into mass psychosis. With the small clutch of innocents, the lovers are trapped by the Feds in an elevator, and as they plunge to their deaths, a stroke of lunatic physics plops them onto a ramshackle Green Tortoise bus.

It's a cliff-hanger odyssey as America splinters to an elderly couple morph into Bonnie & Clyde; Chicago absconds; ghost buffalo trample a helicopter assault; a desert shaman evokes an erotic night of undreamt dreams; and the rickety bus crawls toward a deadly face-off on the Oakland Bay Bridge. On the journey, couples split and bond, small children find magic, space aliens watch it all on TV, and the passengers bond into a tribe of beautiful survivors.

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 6, 2013

About the author

55 years of theatre work & writing in collaboration with Elizabeth Fuller. Ph.D. Stanford, but left college teaching to found a professional theatre ensemble, Theatre X, then formed The Independent Eye, now in its 41st season. 60+ plays & revues produced, both by the Eye and theatres nationally, as well as 4 public radio series. Bishop & Fuller twice recipients of NEA writing fellowships. Many years of national touring. Raised in Midwest, lived in Chicago, Milwaukee, Lancaster, Philadelphia, and now Sebastopol, CA. Began writing prose fiction in 2012.

Reviews

[Eliot Fintushel · Rating 3 out of 5]

REALISTS, by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, is not so much a novel as a sporadic series of political and social comments dramatically illustrated, often funny and frighteningly acute, delivered in muscular language that, blow by blow, has the charge of standup material. It sometimes veers into the metaphysical, and, toward the end, the narrative flirts with self reference. There are cameo appearances by manipulating aliens. The strongest thematic line has to do with the power of dreams indulged and dreams suppressed in a totalitarian culture. Most novels, in the early chapters, build up a thematic and emotional account, which, accruing interest in the middle section, can be drawn on and lavished at the end to reveal something new. REALISTS doesn’t work that way. Rather than developing, it ramifies, proliferates ideas, and accumulates characters who are, ex machina, thrown together in a long, culminating bus ride, not really to relate but to effervesce together. Reading REALISTS, then, is like staying up into the wee hours, surrounded by the spoils of a wild party, drinking booze from many tumblers and listening to some very clever, insightful, and verbally gifted people extemporize together.

[Mark Cofta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel was a revelation! I know and admire Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller from their theater days in Philadelphia running the Independent Eye as well as their published plays, and was intrigued that they were now writing novels. This exciting adventure, published in 2015, forecasts a near future that somewhat came true: insane politicians redefining reality, hysteria leading to lost rights, fake news, and more. They craft a magical story involving a bus full of fascinating characters thrown together by "lunatic physics" that's great fun to read, though I paused often to mull their deft turns of phrase and incisive commentary.