Summary of Casey Sherman's Helltown

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 Edie Vonnegut, the author’s daughter, brought a boy home to meet her father. Her father was extremely protective of her and extremely angry that she was seeing hippies.

#2 Sydney Vonnegut, the author’s daughter, met a boy in Ptown named Tony Costa. They became close, and Sydney began living with him. Her sister, who did not approve of Sydney’s relationship with Costa, confronted her about it one day.

#3 Sydney Vonnegut, the author’s daughter, met a boy named Tony Costa in Ptown. They got high and went to a cemetery to rob a doctor’s office, just like the movies.

#4 Sydney Vonnegut, the author’s daughter, met a boy named Tony Costa in Ptown. They got high, went to a cemetery to rob a doctor’s office, and then went to a wooded area to hide the drugs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350039573

IRB Media

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Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Edie Vonnegut was nervous about bringing the boy home to meet her father, Kurt. He was locked away in his study, editing his latest novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. He was protective of Edie, and worried about her getting swept up in the hippie scene in Provincetown.

#2

Sydney Monzon was a year out of Nauset High School, where she had graduated in 1967. She was fascinated by Ptown, which was only a thirty-minute drive from the place where she grew up. She wanted a new life filled with adventure and exploration.

#3

Sydney drove her father to a cemetery near Corn Hill Beach in North Truro to get drugs. She waited while he went inside the doctor’s office to pillage it, then drove him back to Ptown.

#4

Costa had a pill stash in the woods near Cemetery Road. He and Sydney drove down a dirt track, barely wide enough for the Oldsmobile, and came to a small clearing.

#5

The couple was completely alone in the Oldsmobile, but they were not alone. The young man's split personality, an alter ego he had named Cory, had come along for the ride.

#6

Costa and Sydney had finished stashing the drugs when Cory suddenly appeared, holding a knife to Costa’s neck. You fucked my head up bad tonight, Cory, Costa muttered to himself as he pulled out the knife. Let’s leave her alone.

#7

Costa ran after Sydney, who was walking with her back turned to him. He stabbed her repeatedly with the knife, causing a fountain of blood to spray across his shirt.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Linda Monzon, Sydney’s sister, went to the AP supermarket where her sister had been working for the past two weeks. She noticed that Sydney’s bicycle was outside, secured by a padlock. She walked into the store and asked the female clerk if her sister was taking her break. The clerk said that Sydney hadn’t come to work that night.

#2

The police continued to search for Sydney, and eventually they found her friend Sire, who had a group of hippies who answered to the names Romulus, Barabbas, Speed, Weed, and Fluff. They listened intently as he told them stories about his travels.

#3

In 1968, there were more than four hundred runaway girls in New England alone. Sydney Monzon had likely joined a caravan on some kind of drug-fueled trip to who knows where. She would turn up sooner or later when the reefer and pills ran out.

#4

Linda Drouin, the girl who went missing from Milford, Maine, had graduated at the top of her class. She had moved to Boston with her baby daughter, and then moved to California with her new husband. She got divorced and moved to West Barnstable, where she met Kurt Vonnegut, who became her second husband.

#5

Vonnegut’s relationship with another Cape Cod novelist, Norman Mailer, was complicated. They had first met in 1951 when Mailer was writing his second book, Barbary Shore, which was an instant national bestseller. Vonnegut thought Mailer’s debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, was a very good book, but he thought the sociology behind it was a little weak.

#6

The Vietnam War continued to escalate in 1968, with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy