Short Stories 366:129 — “A Masked Camaraderie,” by Julian Lopez

[image error]Recently, I took part in and watched a Bookathon (a series of online author panels with Bold Strokes Books), and I ended up learning about Julian Lopez’s debut collection of dark/horror tales, Cirque des Freaks and Other Tales of Horror. Now, you all know I’m not a huge horror reader, unless that horror is of the slower-build, more-disturbing-than-visceral sort, but I nabbed a copy, cracked the first story, and settled down in the bright, bright sunlight of day to see where things would go.

“A Masked Camaraderie,” is set in the 30’s, and tells the tale of a man part of a trio of school friends who have since separated by chance and, in the case of one, marriage. He’s a bit of the odd-man-out of the trio, but he knows it, and knows he doesn’t come close to the relationship the two other men always seemed to have. The subtext is pretty clear: although one of the men married, there were feelings at play between the other two, and an invitation for the two of them to join the married couple in Venice strikes our narrator as a bit affected: likely, it’s the company of the other man truly desired, but he goes on the journey anyway.

The subtle interplay of the four people is so incredibly well written. The narrator’s voice, connecting with the wife somewhat, but also knowing more than he wants to tell her, is really nicely written. And then comes the darkness in the tale: the wife decides they must go to a masked party, and is pleased to finally have a use for four beautiful masks she found sealed away, perhaps for centuries. They don them, and not only does it free the quartet from being their usual selves, it invites someone else—or something else—along for their evening. The horror here is in the narrator’s discovery of the true nature of the being and the masks, in the reality of potentially being too late, and that put it squarely in the kind of horror I like. Onward to the next tale…