Harare Review of Books

237 pages. Published September 18, 2024 by Raw Dog Screaming Press. SF.

---

Eugen Bacon has a way of writing the world that’s incredibly unique. It’s like she sees between its layers and around its corners, as if light bends a particular way for her only. This is yet another outstanding collection of stories, hard to pigeonhole into a particular genre (although I’ve heard Bacon use Afro-Irreal, and her publishers call this dark SF). It doesn’t matter; what does is that Bacon is a phenomenally powerful storyteller, and each collection she brings out is better than the last.

Setting Bacon apart is her scope, which is international, but also uniquely African and Australian. So you’ll find Aussie colloquialisms and an African medicine man and lots of descriptions of African food and flora all within these pages. Again, labels don’t matter; you may not always get a sense of the dimensions of the worlds Bacon creates, but they are so joyous to live in.

Fittingly, there is a ‘poetic introduction’ to this collection, by Linda D. Addison. The first story, The Devil Don’t Come With Horns, is a spooky thriller with very wise child protagonists (in fact, many of the children in these stories are precocious in their wisdom). In the intriguing Naked Earth, everyone falls into two factions, the Embracers and the Unshackled, although one can live (for a while) as an Undecided. The Set is about a man slipping between realities on a reality tv show (clever!), when all he wants is to be at his job on radio. Derive, Moderately charmed me for the way aliens try to bridge the communication gap with humans. The story the collection gets its name from, The Mystery of a Place Between Waking and Forgetting, is Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery in Pemba (that’s in East Africa; if that doesn’t intrigue you, honestly, what will?!). There’s also a redo of Bacon’s story about a water runner in a very dry, future East African place, in The Water Runner. The delightful witchdoctor, Knuckles (what a great name), gets the help of ravens in the excellent Sleuthing for a Cause, which I read twice.

There’s grief—so much grief; love; families; singularities; magic; spirit children; clever ravens (redundant, sorry); religions older than Christianity; time travel and interdimensional travel; also, a great story about the legendary Lightning Bird, and a fable about a crocodile and a boy that’s worthy of Aesop. The collection ends with the dreamy and surreal The Zanzibar Trail, where a couple that comes to Zanzibar as tourists looking, perhaps, for something real and grounding, find themselves far more than they had bargained for when they experience echoes of the Indian Ocean slave trade—a subject I’m sooo glad and grateful to encounter in Bacon’s SF.

What a wonderful collection this is, beautifully put together and so satisfying. Bacon’s place between waking and forgetting lies somewhere in the slipstream, and there are infinities between these covers for readers to experience (far more profound than a TARDIS). It will be one of the best single-author SF collections you’ll ever read.

Many thanks to RDS Press and to NetGalley for early access.

Affiliate link: Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here.