Lucia's Masks

Lucia's Masks follows the journey of six strangers who meet by chance after fleeing the psychic defilement of a barbaric totalitarian state and travel North to where they can create a free and humane society. The novel interweaves their personal histories with their experience and encounters as they journey together. The principal voice belongs to Lucia; the group's forager, an aspiring sculptress, who once cleaned office buildings for a living. Sickened by the moral decay and the dominant culture's obsession with pornography, she has chosen to seek spiritual renewal and has chosen to remain a virgin. When she leaves the city, she takes with her a ball of clay and a copy of the death mask of John Keats. Her companions in flight from the city are the Outpacer, a former extreme hedonist and philanderer, who now hides his face and identity behind a monk's cowl; Bird Girl, a young woman constantly searching for books from the past because the libraries have been razed and all reading material is now proscribed; Chandler, a teen who was born and raised in the "Egg", a self-contained domed fortress constructed by his father to insulate them from society; Candace, a former facilitator, whose self-regard and attempts to dominate the group creates continual agitation; and Harry, an 88-year-old survivor of the society that reviles the elderly and does nothing for them. As the group progresses towards their fragile dream amid their own bickering and frailties, they encounter a theatre box with six masks with uncanny powers that profoundly changes the way they think and behave.