The Club

Masks as a symbol serve a dual function in the novel, helping to disguise as well as expose individuals during the launch of Island Home. The novel takes place on Halloween weekend, traditionally a time to dress in costume. On the final evening, an immersive theater group puts on a huge production, cloaking its audience and giving them each a stylized comedy or tragedy mask. This uniform disguise conceals individual identities. Annie relies on it in her plot to have Keith and Freddie kill Ned and disappear back into the anonymous crowd. Unfortunately for Adam, it equally conceals the victim’s identity, contributing to his death when Keith mistakes him for his brother. The accompanying motif of concealment highlights the theme of Constructing and Revising Personal Narratives.

For both murderer and victim, this moment of concealed identity is also a moment of revelation. Adam finally accepts responsibility for his complicity in Ned’s crimes, and Keith becomes a murderer. He literally reduces Adam to a body in the ultimate theft of agency, which is a natural extension of the crime for which Ned blackmails him, in which he renders women unconscious and photographs their naked bodies.