“The Mask it Wears” (2024) by Sarah Musnicky

There’s a routine to the art of a scare. First, get into position.
—Sarah Musnicky, “The Mask It Wears” in Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology (2024) 147

Horror follows the syntax of its age. Bela Lugosi’s opera cape set the standard for vampire dress for generations. The talking boards used by séances were commercialized as parlor games, and decades later there are books and films where ouija boards are considered genuine hotlines to the afterlife. H. P. Lovecraft lived during a time when many of the trappings of horror we know today were first being standardized and commercialized.

Lovecraft never visited a haunted house attraction or saw a slasher film. Those are the product of a later period. We, Lovecraft’s heirs, live in a different world, one awash with horror stories in every medium. Tastes have not necessarily refined, but they have agglutinated. Old familiar horrors carry a nostalgic twang, not a breathless shiver—but that’s a problem that Lovecraft himself faced.

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatual Horror in Literature”

Generally speaking, Lovecraft did not set his horrors in far away exotic places and distant times. His horrors might have been ancient, but they were set in the now, an age with motorcars, submarines, airplanes, radio, telephones, and electric lights. If they had cellphones and the internet in the 1920s and 30s, Lovecraft would have had to factor them into the plots of his weird tales.

Lovecraft did not concern himself overmuch with the methods of the Society for Psychical Research or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; heterodox occultism of any stripe was something he largely lacked interest in. Likewise, he never let a vampire in an opera cape stride onto one of his pages. The pages of Weird Tales were filled with old familiar horrors. Lovecraft strove to provide something different; something new and unexpected.

Second, wait for the first round of screams heading in your direction.
—Sarah Musnicky, “The Mask It Wears” in Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology (2024) 147

There is nothing wrong with playing with old familiar horrors, or of trying to marry old tropes to new ones. A number of writers have played with combining Lovecraftian horrors with the slasher genre that gained prominence with Hollywood slasher films like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). Robert M. Price’s “A Mate for the Mutilator” (2004) comes to mind, and Chaosium’s Blood Brothers (1990). How well it works depends on the skill of the creator involved; the personal, psychological horror of the slasher stalking their prey, or the gore-filled climax of an elaborate or particularly bloody kill are rather more visceral than the kind of cerebral horror to which Lovecraft aspired. Yet they are not incompatible.

“The Mask It Wears” by Sarah Musnicky plays very specifically with horror tropes, in the syntax of the now. It was published in Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology, and there is something evocative of that theme throughout this story, without actually giving a label to it. The narrator has a routine as part of their job. When something happens that throws them off-script, they’re thrown off their game. The mask they put on for dealing with their coworkers and the outside world slips—and that is the double meaning in the title. Not just the mask that the killer wears on their spree, or the mask that the protagonist wears on their job, but the mask of normal behavior that the protagonist projects, all the time, to deal with a world that seems, if not innately hostile, then somewhat incomprehensible.

Musnicky never tries to assign a label to her protagonist, why they do what they do, why they react the way they do to the unexpectedly. Yet the behavior and mindset are there, for those who recognize such things. It sets them apart from the rest of the would-be victims. Unable to move with the herd, the killer in the haunted house walks right into their room.

Lovecraft was fond of a terminal revelation, something that the whole story had been building up to, but only revealed in its fullness in the end. It was a style of fiction that owed something to mystery and detective fiction, where the last twist was revealed to explain away the final puzzle—though in Lovecraft’s case, he was willing to reveal just enough for the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. Musnicky’s story ends much the same way. We never get all the answers. Just enough.

“The Mask It Wears” by Sarah Musnicky was published Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology (2024) by Third State Books.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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