Conrad Bishop

Masks Conrad Bishop

At the behest of his patron, a medieval scribe narrates his ordeal as an inquisitive, befuddled six-year-old on tour with his family troupe of players. Performing their farces across a landscape of war, plague, religious strife and feral cats, they travel from sunny Greece into the uncharted north, playing market fairs and noblemen's banquets, while transporting a hamper of curse-bearing masks that intrude themselves into the boy's dreams and the troupe's reality, culminating in a Nordic Armageddon.



Though set in Late Antiquity, it's based on the authors' own experience as a family of traveling players with an offbeat mix of farce and tragedy: playing for gods, playing for peasants, playing for cats. It's about carrying the curses bequeathed by previous generations, dealing with catcalls and calamities, improvising making sense of the fears that provoke self-destruction and improvising the strategies of daily survival.