By Peter Cashorali
It was a horror novel, the cover lurid with emblems of death and worse than death, clear warning what to expect, tantalizing inducement to open the cover, come on in, start reading. For a while it acted like another kind of novel entirely, a romance, a comedy about daily life, a satire or young adult mystery. Which made the first uncanny scene all the more shocking. The characters meanwhile are all in denial. They’ve heard of the ancient curse but tell each other it’s quaint, just a leftover bit of folklore. And of course the strength of the curse is that no one believes in it, or at least not for themselves. Meanwhile it claims characters that we’ve come to care about, so that their transformation is not just ghastly but heart-breaking. They show us the secrets of the grave, which we now realize we don’t want to know. They become what we fear most. No terrible step is left out– memory loss and changes in personality, treatments that do no good but demand payment, eventually a total stranger who devours hope alive. By the time we realize this is no novel it’s too late. We already love someone.
Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist, formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. Recent work appers or will in Synkroniciti, Soul Forte Journal, Empyrean, Abandoned Mine and Brief Wilderness. Early work is Gay Fairy Tales (HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) and Gay Fairy and Folk Tales (Faber and Faber: 1997).
MoonPark Review 