Fiction Reviews
A Place Between Waking and Forgetting
(2024) Eugen Bacon, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 178pp, e-book, ISBN: 978-1-947-87978-2
These seventeen stories of luxuriant and often surreal speculation – eight of which are published here for the first time – span a range of genres, from science-fiction to horror, as well as settings, from Australia to East Africa and outer space. The best are richly descriptive and heady, drawing on different cultures to stretch the narrative envelope and take the reader beyond their comfort zone.
‘The Water Runner’, for example, is set in a drought-stricken land, where resourceful Zawadi has the job of reclaiming water from the dead, until she is persuaded to take an offer you know she really should refuse. In ‘The Water’s Memory’, by contrast, the problem is not drought but non-native plants and culture that smother the lake and lure away the best and the brightest, respectively. Whereas in ‘She Loves How He Glows’, the foreign elements are truly alien but who nevertheless end up both embraced and loved.
Some pieces are narratively more straightforward than others, such as ‘Derive, Moderately’, which is essentially a refugee story, told through a focus on the practical issues of caring for a toddler in a small space-ship fleeing catastrophe. ‘The Devil Don’t Come With Horns’ is likewise easy to fall into, with its Bradbury-ish tone, albeit written in the vernacular.
But a number begin beguilingly enough, drawing the reader in with well-executed detail, only to suddenly introduce a random element that spells doom for the protagonist. In ‘Paperweight’ that element is obvious from the title but the impact on a love-lorn teenager seems overly heavy. Similarly, ‘The Lightning Bird’ pursues a relationship, into marriage this time, and likewise deploys a magical artefact to bring proceedings to a curt end. Even more morally faultless is the schoolgirl from Dar es Salaam in ‘Dimension Stone’, who dreams of a better life in Australia, but happens to pick up a ring holding the stone of the title, with disastrous results. No doubt the point is to emphasise that terrible things may happen without reason but the overall effect is unsatisfying.
Not all the stories end grimly, it must be said. ‘Naked Earth’ gives us a world polarised between ‘embracers’, whose bracelets store energy from both steps and sex, and those who are ‘unshackled’. Hope of an alternative is represented by Naeema, one of the ‘undecided’ who seeks ‘a space of transition that is both human and saving’ (p. 29). Such a space might also be found in ‘Human Beans’, which begins disturbingly as people start to vanish from Wema’s life but ends on a positive and uplifting note. ‘The Set’ similarly presents an accumulation of bewildering anomalies but is both less linear in the telling and more inconclusive in the ending.
Disquieting events also lie at the heart of ‘The Mystery of a Place Between Waking and Forgetting’, which features ‘Shalok Homsi’, addressing their ‘Watison’, in a twist on the classic ‘who’s killing the hotel guests?’ caper. This was one of my favourites, together with ‘The Zanzibar Trail’, written with Clare E. Rohden in what seems to be a deliberately stilted manner, and which takes the reader on a hallucinogenic journey, only to return to the utterly banal.
Given the emphasis in many of these stories on food, used to emphasise, as it so often is, that we’re not in Kansas anymore, perhaps this collection should come with an advisory not to be consumed in one go, but savoured piecemeal as a way of leavening a more mundane diet of the fantastic.
Steven French
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