I am excited to discover that Claude Lalumiere is working on a volume of Canadian superhero stories with Camille Alexa titled Masked Mosaic. Lalumiere has written several stories on the Canadian superheroic including Hochalga and Sons (from Objects of Worship ChiZine 2009) about a Jewish victim of the holocaust who, due to Nazi experimentation became a superhero whose goal is to prowl the streets of Montreal fighting injustice and hate crimes; and Destroyer of Worlds about a man who discovers that his comic book heroes have come to life and jumped across the universal barriers into his own world to prevent the destruction of his world by a battle between Hindu gods.

The volume is currently titled Masked Mosaic, playing on Lalumiere’s interest in the multicultural aspect of Canadian identity. This volume promises to bring together superheroes, supervillains, masked vigilantes, mutants, and other crime-fighters or criminals. Based on Lalumiere’s previous works, I suspect he will be bringing together a number of stories that complicate the black and white binary of hero and villain. Lalumiere loves to prove to his reader that everyone should resist easy categorization and that is clear in his call for stories for this volume, inviting writers to submit genre-mashing stories that play with ideas of everything from horror, SF, surrealism, to the romantic.

Lalumiere is calling for submissions at http://maskedmosaic.submittable.com/submit . His deadline for submissions is August 1, 2012, so if you are an aspiring author who enjoys the superheroic, now may be the time to polish up one of your stories.

I look forward to seeing what he is able to bring together in this volume, and know it will be exciting and mind-expanding.