Realists

A cross-genre comic tale with a fantasy tinge in the Vonnegut vein: 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 gnashing teeth 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 bits: 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.