No one knows who painted that cover and, trust me, I've asked. Everyone. Which is too bad because it's the best part of this book. Not that it's a terrible book but after that cover your expectations are sky high, and this isn't even a heavy metal horror novel.
It starts with underwater zombies attacking police divers in the Hudson River, before we discover that we're not experiencing reality but instead a Dreamie. Written in 1988, Stage Fright is a near future sci-fi novel about the Microwave Dream-Imagine Transmitter (MDIT), aka the Dreamatron, made possible by advances in digital recording, bubble memory, soundless radio, and a better understanding of brain functioning that allows creators to transmit “Dreamies” directly into people’s sense centers. (There's also a monorail that runs along the Hudson on the NJ side, from Bayonne to Fort Lee. The Future!) A kid from Princeton was the first one to transmit horror and sci-fi Dreamies into people's heads as the opening act for a rock band named Jest, but now the undisputed King of the Dreamies is Izzy Stark, The Dream Maker.
Izzy is a major star with a fan magazine called Vampirophile and a girlfriend named Helen who he doesn't have sex with anymore because he's so absorbed with prepping for his live Halloween Dreamie concert called The Mystery Show. It debuts at midnight because he's intense. To give him an edge he's taking an experimental drug, Taraxein, made from the blood of schizophrenics, that induces schizophrenia. Izzy’s fascinated by whether a schizophrenic can make Dreamies, and the Taraxein hits his bloodstream like blotter acid and he discovers that if he takes enough of it he'll dream of a giant chicken...and in real life a giant chicken appears “with murder in its eyes” and starts eating people.
Before long, Izzy's hallucinating that everyone around him has featureless chrome faces, skull-faced bikers are beating up folks, and a floating apparition of Helen's dead sister is vomiting flesh-eating bugs all over herself. The inventor of Taraxein, Dr. Nosberger, explains that Izzy is a “born dreamer” and they never did controlled studies of the effect of Taraxein on “born dreamers.” Then he gets found dead, stuffed inside his fridge.
For a while, it seems like Izzy's signature sign-off line — “Ciao, baby!” — might be the most bloodchilling thing in the book, but then Izzy turns into a long-haired skeleton and stages his midnight show at the Majestic Theater in NJ which is no longer called Mystery Show but is now called Inferno: Abandon Hope, Ye Who Enter Here which is longer, but probably more accurate. The show kicks off with the sky opening over a volcano and LOTR Nazgul flying around, like a Frank Frazetta painting created when Frazetta was in a really bad mood.
Then everything becomes a “Boschean hellscape” full of shambling figures tossing punk rockers into fiery pits, “toad-headed grotesqueries” hacking at lizard-ladies, and a chicken monster “scratching the shit out of a red smear that might have once been human.” The metaphors flow fast and thick as one kid “recalled Rejdak's pulverized face, pulped like a grape after dropping a bowling ball on it, like a canteloupe two minutes after being rolled out into the freeway traffic during rush hour, like a caterpillar that had wandered into a printing press.” That's a lot of things to look like! Poor Rejdak!
Pumpkinhead monsters join the fray and since we're in New Jersey soon this devolves into kids in denim vests versus an airbrushed heavy metal album cover while Izzy's giant face transforms into an enormous skull with glowing red eyes and desiccated scraps of flesh clinging to it, looming over everything like Eddie, Iron Maiden's mascot. Then the book's hero is able to wrest psychic control of the Dreamie from Izzy and he conjures up a flaming sword and a glowing axe and, as the skies rain blood, he manages to defeat Izzy. This takes approximately 79 pages.
In the end, Izzy dies...or does he? And the Majestic Theater burns to the ground...or does it? In an epilogue, it turns out the CIA has abducted Izzy and faked his death. Even though Dreamies have now been made illegal, the CIA started a covert project recruiting Dreamatron warriors to battle the KGB's rumored Dreamatraon warrior brigade. But that's a sequel we never got, and are all the poorer for it. Imagine what the skeletons would be doing on that cover?