There’s been a lot of novels lately that are putting different spins on classic stories. There’s Madeline Miller’s Circe, a retelling of The Odyssey from the perspective of the titular sorceress, while Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, puts a new spin of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
But in Michael J. DeLuca’s surrealist fantasy noir novel The Jaguar Mask (paperback, Kindle), he’s not so much putting a different spin on a Mayan myth as he is imagining what that mythical figure would be up to these days.
In the following email interview, DeLuca discusses where he got the idea for The Jaguar Mask, as well as what influenced how he told this story.
To start, what is The Jaguar Mask about, and what kind of a world is it set in?
The Jaguar Mask is about a jaguar shapeshifter posing as an illegal cab driver in Guatemala City and a visionary artist whose mother’s murder throws the two of them together, forcing them to try to understand their powers and their past amid increasing political unrest in a country struggling to resurrect itself after thirty years of civil war.
Where did you get the idea for The Jaguar Mask?
I have loved Maya culture and art since I was a kid; I think my enthusiasm rubbed off a bit on my youngest sister, who moved to Guatemala to do NGO work in the 2010s.
One of the many times I visited her there, we went to Tikal, this ancient, ruined Maya city in the Petén jungle famous for its appearance as the rebel base on Yavin IV in Star Wars: New Hope. They have a little museum there on site to house some of the artifacts that haven’t been stolen and ferreted away in American and European museums, and among those was this sharp length of bone the Maya priests used for bloodletting, on which was inscribed a tiny, incredibly detailed depiction of a bunch of underworld entities in a canoe.
That’s how I learned about the mythic figure known as the “jaguar paddler,” who is something like a Mesoamerican Charon: an underworld ferryman. I was already deeply in love with Guatemala by this point, and knew I wanted to write something about it. And I started thinking, what would the jaguar paddler be doing now? Driving an illegal cab?
The Jaguar Mask sounds like it’s an urban fantasy story…
It is absolutely fantasy in an urban setting, and I thought about it that way as I was writing it, but more I guess as a reaction to or in conversation with the tropes of the urban fantasy genre that was such a big thing in the ’90s and 2000s than in participation with it. Because it’s also very influenced by Latin American magic realism, which as far as I’m aware hasn’t crossed over very much with urban fantasy.
It also owes a lot to noir, but interrogates some of the mainstays of noir, e.g. there’s nothing in The Jaguar Mask remotely like a femme fatale. So maybe it falls in between those three genres without actually landing in any of them.
That’s how I like it, I suppose; most of what I’ve written has had an inherent resistance to categorization. But I know people find what they like to read using those categories. So: call it surrealist fantasy noir, if that’s not too much of a mouthful.
The Jaguar Mask is your first novel, though you previously wrote the novella Night Roll, and have had short stories in such journals and anthologies as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Weird Dream Society, and Kaleidotrope. Are there any writers who had a big influence on Jaguar but not on anything else you’ve written?
Lucius Shepard’s 1987 novella The Jaguar Hunter shares a lot with The Jaguar Mask, at least superficially. It’s got that noir sensibility, a protagonist lost amid forces beyond his control, a jaguar shapeshifter, and it’s got the magic realist influences and the Central American setting.
I was a fan of Lucius’ writing especially when I was younger, and also to a certain extent of Lucius himself. He spent a lot of time in Honduras, and like me with Guatemala, I think he was profoundly affected by the depth of injustice he saw there. I went to a talk he gave at one Readercon about the human impacts of industrial farming, which was really devastating and has stayed with me.
But I’m not otherwise trying to write like him at all. He’s a very masculine writer, had work in Playboy etc., with a kind of self-destructive, tortured genius vibe that I personally am pretty thankful has gone out of vogue at least in genre. And since his death, it’s come to my attention that he was himself somewhat of a trickster figure, peddling a bunch of weird, sensationalist bs about his own life — not unlike The Jaguar Mask‘s antagonist, El Bufo, I suppose — though not on purpose. So I’m not sure I’d advocate for an unqualified Lucius Shepard renaissance. But The Jaguar Hunter I loved, and clearly it did influence me, if less than consciously. I should dip into it again and see if it holds up.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games?
I loved, while also hating Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. I loved that it let me hear Yucatec Maya spoken aloud and gave work to Maya performers, I loved the setting, I hated the sensationalized violence and exoticism.
I saw the original Avatar, dubbed into Spanish with English subtitles, in a huge, swanky first-run theater in Guatemala City when it first came out. Like Apocalypto, it is a movie that sensationalizes the exotic. Unlike Mel Gibson, James Cameron at least tries to grapple with questions of colonialism and extractive capitalist violence. The colonizing human military force throws around the word “indigenous” a lot, referring to the blue aliens, the Na’vi. That word translated into Spanish is “Indigenós,” and in Guatemala, particularly in Guatemala City, it’s a word fraught with political weight, calling up the thirty year civil war and ongoing genocide, exploitation and political disenfranchisement of Maya and Indigenous peoples by the ruling-class elite. And here I was watching this fairly over-the-top blockbuster movie in a huge room full of people for whom these concepts were anything but abstract. So that was a fairly profound cinema-going experience that definitely contributed to the book I wrote, even if it was a reaction against rather than in favor.
I am of course a fan of classic noir, and Chinatown in particular sticks with me because of the environmental justice aspect: it’s all about water rights in a droughted L.A., which feels newly incredibly relevant.
As far as video games: there was a point-and-click adventure game called Déjà Vu, in the style of the original MUDs of the ’80s, which I think I only rented once for the original 8-bit Nintendo and never finished — but that may actually have been my introduction to the noir genre, and the vibe stuck with me. This private dick wakes up in a motel bathroom with a revolver, a bloody head, and no memory of who he is or what he’s doing there, and he has to unravel that he’s been framed for murder.
If I may mention one TV show that is not out yet, so it could not possibly have been an influence but occupies an unreasonable amount of real estate in my brain: there has been an animated show in the works for Mexican TV for years now, code named Aztec Batman. It’s a superhero riff on the Mesoamerican bat deity, Camazotz, and it has incredibly badass concept art, some of which was made by Moníca Robles Corzo, who also contributed a bunch of cover art for Reckoning, which you should absolutely look up and be inspired by.
And what about your cats, Piper Elizabeth McGee and Esmerelda Weatherwax? What influence did they have on The Jaguar Mask? Wait, is that why it’s The Jaguar Mask and not The Corgi Mask or The Koala Mask? Did they force you to write this book? Blink twice for yes.
My cat are rescue cats; they are extremely non-predatory cuddly fuzzballs. And yes, they — and my syncretic, secular cat-worship which is itself a direct result of their awesomeness — are the reason The Jaguar Mask is not The Skull Mask or The Caiman Mask or The Conquistador Mask, all of which are things that appear in the book and could have been in the running for titles but totally, totally weren’t.
But also: jaguars are awesome! They are the biggest big cat in the western hemisphere, they are the stealthiest and most elusive big cat on Earth (to the point that they basically qualify as a cryptid in the state of Arizona), they have the strongest bite strength of any living terrestrial predator, unlike every other cat species on Earth but one they love to swim, they routinely hunt caiman in the water, and as far as I know (and if I’m wrong, please don’t tell me) no Florida Man have ever managed to keep a jaguar as a pet. What’s not to love?
Esmerelda Weatherwax, Piper Elizabeth McGee
Fantasy novels are sometimes one-off stories and sometimes part of larger sagas. What is The Jaguar Mask?
I expect some people will get to the end and think, “cliffhanger!” And wait eagerly for the sequel. And I apologize to those people in advance. I am a huge, obsessive fan of open endings, where the reader is handed the tools and basically shoved out the door into the world the story has created for them, asking what happens next? This book has one of those. Spoiler alert.
On the other hand, Night Roll had one of those endings, too, and there exists an outline for a sequel. So you never know.
Earlier I asked if The Jaguar Mask was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Jaguar could work as a movie, show, or game?
I would go with a movie, because movies have endings. Like I said, I like open endings. But I also like endings, all kinds, and I tend to get grumpy at TV shows for not having them. True Detective: Night Country was an exception: that had an awesome ending. If I could get a single season anthology show version of The Jaguar Mask, I’d take it.
That said: guess who will absolutely cash the option checks regardless, donate the entire proceeds to environmental justice charities and never look back.
So, if someone wanted to adapt The Jaguar Mask into a movie or a limited run TV show, who would you want them to cast as Felipe, Cristina, and El Bufo?
First let me apologize for bringing fraughtness to what should be an innocently fun question, but it’s important to me to think about intersectional Indigenous representation here, because I’m a white guy who wrote a book about Maya people and I really want to go out of my way to be respectful even in the silliest of contexts.
My answer for Felipe was going to be Tenoch Huerta, who played Namor aka Kukulcan in Black Panther 2. I loved seeing him on screen, I loved his portrayal of that character, and I was very annoyed with everyone responsible for railroading Namor into remaining the bad guy in the second half of that movie. I really wanted to see him given more generous material to work with. But now I find out he’s been accused of sexual assault. And it is my policy to believe victims regardless of how much I am a fan of the accused.
So then I thought of Rudy Youngblood who played Jaguar Paw in Apocalypto…but apparently he’s been accused of faking Indigenous descent. There just aren’t that many Native actors working in Hollywood, for all the reasons you’d expect; it seems telling that my first two choices turn out to be less than savory.
Digging a little deeper, though, I remembered Josué Maychi, who played the shaman in Black Panther 2, is responsible for the use of the Maya language that appears in that movie, and who seems like a lovely person. So I feel pretty great about recommending him to you all’s imagination.
Cristina: Pie in the sky? How about Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, who played Ellora Danon in Reservation Dogs. I loved that show so much I’m not even mad at them anymore for ruining the perfect ending of season 2 by having a season 3.
El Bufo: Cheech Marin would be a lot of fun, I think. He’s made an entire second career out of that seedy / self-mocking Mexican gangster vibe. I also sure would not kick Alfred Molina out of bed.
Finally, if someone enjoys The Jaguar Mask, what fantasy novel or novella would you suggest they check out next?
Try Lucius Shepard’s The Jaguar Hunter, if you’re up for it.
Also please consider checking out Sesshu Foster’s badass and super weird Atomik Aztex, a short alt-history novel in which the Aztec Empire was not conquered by Cortés but went on to become an atomic world power.
Lastly, the definitive Guatemalan surrealist fantasy novel is Hombres de Maíz (Men Of Maize) by Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Nobel Prize winning political dissident and exile, for whom the baby in The Jaguar Mask is named. It is an absolutely gorgeous head trip and deserves to be dug up out of the university library stacks where it languishes and reprinted.
