Photo by somewhereintheworldtoday (Flickr)

All Hallows Eve, that day on which we disguise ourselves in order to ward off evil spirits, is upon us! Halloween, that day on which children dress in costume in order to acquire free candy and adults force themselves to watch scary movies, is upon us! To celebrate, we went to the shelves and found books in which characters get into costume…

Ten Talon Titles that feature Characters in Costume or Disguise

1. The play Hosanna by Michel Tremblay, in which a Montreal drag queen is bullied by her fellow drag queens after dressing up as Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Costume is a key plot point in this one; in fact, the story begins with a Halloween party!

2. Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Berlin Blues, in which German businessmen attempt to make Otter Lake, a fictitious native reserve, into an amusement park. This book wins in terms of scale: a whole culture is put in costume, by outsiders, as the stereotypical version of itself!

3. Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre by Larry Tremblay, which uses costume and the layering of characters to pose questions about the nature of modern identities and personal histories: “Scratch the surface of any story and underneath you will find layer upon layer of fiction masquerading as fact.”

4. Bash’d, a gay rap opera by Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow, in which a man dresses as a woman, with dangerous results…

5. Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand, translated by John Murrell, the classic play in which one character disguises his letters and passion as those of another.

6. Chameleon and Other Stories by Bill Schermbrucker. Though these characters are not always in literal disguise, they must change and blend in order to adapt to their circumstances, which is the thesis of this book of short stories.

7. La Duchesse de Langeais & Other Plays, which prominently features one of many of Tremblay’s transvestites.

8. Another Tremblay book on our list is The Black Notebook: “In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main—Montreal’s disreputable Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Hanging out with a theatre company in her off hours, Céline sees opening before her a world where it is not only possible, but even desirable to pretend. When the director offers her a role in The Trojan Women, the die is cast.” Drag queens and the theatre: when it comes to costumes, what more could you ask for?

9. Change Room, a book of poetry by Mark Cochrane that puts forth “the body as a willful and skillful construct of the contrary obsessions” and problematizes not costumes or clothes themselves but the places in which we remove and exchange them: “a room is a stanza, is a space, is an enclosure; in which a change, a transaction, a metamorphosis takes place.”

10. And finally: Coping with Emotions and Otters, in which there are no costumes or (literal) disguises, but for the launch of which the poetess Dina Del Bucchia dressed up as an otter! See below evidence.

Happy Halloween!