Summary

In “French Comedy of Horrors”, Diodorus Pilon sits at a café during the solar eclipse. He and his mentor, Roger Bolamba, watch a couple perform “a dance that [is] somehow anachronistic but at the same time terrifying, and that, according to Bolamba, [is] known only deep in the northern rain forests” (80). At a table next to them, a well-dressed man is sitting with two women, one of whom claims to have gone blind. The narrator and his group of artist friends sneer at her theatrical display and leave the café. Later that night, the protagonist walks home and “instead of turning right toward the sea, turn[s] left onto a fairly wide street running uphill, almost imperceptibly at first” (86). As he strolls, he hears the call of a bird and calls back to it. The bird does not return his vocalization...