Eugen Bacon’s Afro-Irreal Short Story Collection A Place Between Waking and Forgetting is Set for Publication in 2024

African-Australian author Eugen Bacon has a new dark speculative fiction and Afro-Irreal short story collection set to release in 2024. Titled A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, the collection will be published by Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Bacon’s newest collection showcases Black people’s tales by gathering transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, unlimited futures, collisions of worlds, and mythology. According to the publisher, this collection “neither lies only in dark fantasy or black speculative fiction, but features literary themes within the strange and bizarre, as well as the literary movements of Afro-Irrealism and Afro-Futurism.”

We are thrilled to read more of Bacon’s futuristic writing soon! Bacon commented on her experience writing the fascinating short stories in the collection:

I had immense fun writing the stories in A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, in particular the theme story where Sherlock Holmes is a black woman, Shalok Homsi, with a child ward Watison, in a different kind of detective story set in Zanzibar. The appeal of this Afro-setting inspires yet another first-person fantastical odyssey ‘The Zanzibar Trail’ that speaks to the origins of the fictional OmniPark. The order with which one approaches the reading is of no consequence, as each tale is distinct and transitions to the next in the overarching themes of othering, betwixt, inhabitation, hauntings, and unlimited futures.