The Jaguar Mask, by Michael J. DeLuca, is a challenging book, but well worth the effort. It’s overwhelming at times, with bright colors, loud music, crowds, personality clashes, and uncertain soul searches by people who don’t know where they’re going or what they’re supposed to be doing. I started out reading this book in small bites, taking time for digestion, but by the end, I was eating it up eagerly, hungry for the meanings that were emerging and the inspirations I could take from it. Its official release date is today, and I hope a lot of people get to experience it.
The book starts out with Cristina dreaming of a shooting at her mother’s eatery. She wakes up on a bus with her little brother, holding a nephew, hearing her phone ring; it turns out that her vision was true, and her mother had been killed, along with an important foreigner and a couple of other people. Cristina is an artist; the family turns to her, expecting her to take Mama’s place, but the pressures of her art and her visions eventually drive her away to seek her own place.
Next the book switches perspective to Felipe, an unlicensed taxi driver, relied upon by his roomates Aníbal and Luz, a pair of lovers who spend all their time and money on human rights protests against the corrupt, oppressive government. Felipe is parked, taking a call from Aníbal who’s asking for his help, when a man knocks on his window for a ride and won’t take no for an answer. It’s ex-Special Inspector Zamora, now an extragovernmental agent, who has decided to draft Felipe into his investigation of the assassination at the eatery. (But everyone calls Zamora El Bufo, which later events convince me should be translated as The Frog instead of The Clown.)
But Felipe is more than a hapless taxi-driver/assistant. He’s a jaguar in disguise, who wears a succession of masks to blend into human society. When the book opens, that’s all he’s trying to do, just keep his head down, but as the book progresses, he finds purpose and power.
Many other people in the book are trying to hide various secrets, from a terrified witness to the shooting, to Aníbal who can’t produce a passport because of the deadname, to a professor teaching revolution whose inner self is a secret, to a pair of would-be gay lovers in denial. The only significant character who knows what he’s doing and is completely open about it is Hugo, an art teacher who shelters Cristina for a while, as she learns to surrender to her visions and paint them. Eventually Cristina comes into her own understanding and transforms herself, after she and Felipe meet and begin working together.
I don’t recall that the country is explicitly named, but references are made to Totonicapán, a city in Guatemala. The year is not stated, but characters have smartphones. The man named as Director/President, Sonriente, is fictional, but Guatemala has had a history of political dictatorships prior to recent democratic elections.
The Jaguar Mask vividly depicts a society of people who are oppressed but mostly just trying to get by; however, the few, seemingly futile protesters are growing into the many. Despite the fantastical elements of character and plot, the book shows how determined optimism and persistent striving can transform not just people, but perhaps entire societies. I loved how everything came together in this book and how the main characters decided to take agency in their own lives and in helping others.
Content warnings: Murders, police brutality, police corruption, political corruption, poverty, apathy and hopelessness by some, references to sexual relationships.
Disclaimer: I received the eARC as a NetGalley suggestion, with the expectation that I’d review it.
From the publisher, Stelliform Press:
Michael J. DeLuca’s novella Night Roll was a finalist for the Crawford Award in 2020. He is the publisher of Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice. He also runs the indie ebook site Weightless Books, and his short fiction has been appearing since 2005 in places such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Mythic Delirium, Fusion Fragment, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye. He lives in suburbified post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with partner, kid, cats, and microbes.
