by Eugen Bacon
Praise for The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories
“Bacon delivers a commanding and visionary collection of speculative shorts, encompassing surrealism, fantasy, science fiction, and gorgeous, painterly literary fiction. It would be a disservice to call any of these 24 stories the standout, as each is impressive and beautifully rendered in Bacon’s distinct, poetic voice. The stunning title story follows a pair of lovers on a tense road trip that grows increasingly surreal, told in rhythmic, abstract prose. In the moving ‘Swimming with Daddy,’ a little girl reflects on how her father taught her to swim. The humorous ‘Beatitudes’ tells of the first meeting of a young siren and a salesman who has been turned into a toad. Science fictional offerings include ‘Ace Zone,’ about a young woman traveling from planet to planet to draft soldiers into her battalion, and ‘Playback, Jury of the Heart,’ a tale of love that transcends time and space. Complex, earnest, and striking, Bacon’s impeccable work is sure to blow readers away.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (Starred Review)
“The 24 stories that make up Eugen Bacon’s new collection The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories run the gamut in terms of tone, genre, and structure. There are experimental, modernist pieces reminiscent of the New Wave, namely ‘A Good Ball,’ ‘The Enduring,’ or ‘A Man Full of Shadows’; playful, self-aware tales such as ‘The Animal I Am’ and ‘Wolfmother’; and reflective, melancholy stories like ‘Swimming With Daddy’ and ‘The One Who Sees.’ As Seb Doubinsky rightly points out in his Foreword, what ties the collection together is Bacon’s distinctive voice (which Doubinsky compares to free jazz) that nimbly shifts between the lush, the opaque, and the colloquial (Bacon, like myself, is fond of Aussie slang) . . . Bacon’s passion for language and her willingness to play with the short-story form, to never settle on one type of narrative or genre, make this an exciting collection that’s well worth picking up.”
—Ian Mond, LOCUS MAGAZINE
“An exciting and transcendent literary experience with an air of magic anybody should be able to appreciate.”
—Maddison Stoff, AUREALIS MAGAZINE
“Eugen Bacon writes assured, lyrical prose wherein timeless tales bordering multiple genres are hunkered. At the conflux of myth and memory, where cultures meet and twine, her stories devour the past whilst illuminating the future. Reading Bacon is an immersement, a journey. The stories she tells are those to relish.”
—Andrew Hook, award-winning editor and author of Frequencies of Existence
“Delightful, depressing, delicious, desirable, fulfilling. The stories gathered here are airy and prismatic, and the gravitas of Bacon’s worldview does not preclude intimacy or mischief. Many cultures converge and challenge each other in this collection and these prove to be at odds with the equally pressing need to be an individual in the world. The answer is often to weave myths and fables from different traditions imbued with the politics of gender and race, perhaps best illustrated in the persona of the Phoenix which recurs in different guises and with different attributions throughout the book.”
—Dominique Hecq, award-winning poet, novelist, short story writer
“Eugen Bacon writes with cheekiness and a fierce intelligence that shines through every page of her work. Right from the first sentence, the voices of each of her narrators grab the reader with their lucidity, their panache, and their uncompromising observational rigor. This rigor manifests itself in the freshness of Bacon’s prose, making the reader reconsider all expectations related to genre, identity, and gender stereotypes, and opening up new possibilities with every turn of phrase. Her work may be rooted in the conventions of sci-fi, yet its speculative nature is grounded in the most surprising, realistic details that serve to blur the boundaries between literary genres and suggest a more fecund apprehension of what literature might be. Bacon’s narration sometimes borders on the erotic, sometimes on the raw truth of human frailty, but is always delightfully subversive and unapologetically transgressive. When Ursula K. le Guin said that fiction, poetry, drama ‘cleanse the doors of perception,’ perhaps she was talking about this invigorating quality present in the work of Eugen Bacon. If Bacon’s shorter works are any indication of her handling of longer narrative arcs, then readers of her forthcoming novel are in for a delicious and satisfying treat.”
—Roanna Gonsalves, award-winning author of The Permanent Resident
“Bacon’s imaginings are especially resplendent in their connection to Australian and New Zealand cultures, both traditional and acclimated, and shows the unique beauty of speculative fiction Down Under. Whether exploring our fears in the modern landscape, complete with Uber drivers and spying satellites, or through strange landscapes and the eerie minds of quirky protagonists crafted from crisp, punchy prose, one cannot leave without a new appreciation . . . or depreciation . . . of death. Bacon’s stories are simultaneously powerful, yet subtle and endearing.”
—Tamantha Smith
“Each story in the collection is vastly different from the next—in voice, setting and length. Yet the book comprises an assemblage of narratives that flow seamlessly from one to the other, with snappy dialogue and striking imagery that roll off the tongue and widen the reader’s eyes.”
—Angela Wauchop, OTHER TERRAIN
“This is a book to curl up with on a rainy winter afternoon, when you can give each story its due and reflect on it afterwards.”
—Kris Ashton (award-winning author), ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS
“Eugen Bacon writes assured, lyrical prose wherein timeless tales bordering multiple genres are hunkered. At the conflux of myth and memory, where cultures meet and twine, her stories devour the past whilst illuminating the future. Reading Bacon is an immersement, a journey. The stories she tells are those to relish.”
—Keith Rosson, award-winning author of Road Seven, Smoke City and The Mercy of the Tide
“The Road To Woop Woop is paved with wildness and color: vivid and surreal, haunting and hallucinatory. These visions—of the fantastic past, the impossible future, of an Australia or an Africa or an almost-familiar somewhere—are psychedelic in their otherworldliness and alive with the ancient rhythms of folklore and fairytale, heavy with the magic of deep time. In sensual, synaesthetic prose, Bacon crafts unforgettable stories with an imagination and style that transcend genre.”
—J. Ashley-Smith, award-winning author of The Attic Tragedy
Also by Eugen Bacon
Fiction
Claiming T-Mo
Her Bitch Dress
It's Folking Political
Hadithi and The State of Black Speculative Fiction (with Milton Davis)
Black Moon: Graphic Speculative Flash Fiction
Ivory's Story
Non-Fiction
Writing Speculative Fiction
THE ROAD TO WOOP WOOP AND OTHER STORIES. Copyright © 2020 by Eugen Bacon.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at [email protected].
“Swimming with Daddy,” originally published in Meniscus, Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2016
“A Nursery Rhyme,” originally published in Dying & Other Stories, Fiction4All, 2018
“Snow Metal,” originally published in Bards and Sage Quarterly, 2018
“A Maji Maji Chronicle,” originally published in Bukker Tillibul, Swinburne University of Technology, 2015
“A Good Ball,” origin
ally published in Other Terrain Journal, Swinburne University of Technology, 2019
“A Case of Seeing,” originally published in Dying & Other Stories, Fiction4All, 2018
“Five-Second Button,” originally published in Antipodean SF, Issue 243, 2018
“Diminy: Conception, Articulation & Subsequent Development,” TEXT Special Issue No. 32, TEXT Journal, 2015
“Mahuika,” originally published in Every Day Fiction, 2017
“Being Marcus,” originally published in New Writing, Routledge, 2015
“Scars of Grief,” originally published in Bukker Tillibul, Swinburne University of Technology, 2014
“Ace Zone,” originally published in A Hand of Knaves, the Canberrra Speculative Fiction Guild (CSFG), edited by Leife Shallcross and Chris Large, 2018
“A Pining,” originally published in Stylus Lit, 2019
“Dying,” originally published in Bringing It Back, Horrified Press Anthologies, 2018
“Wolfmother,” originally published in Antipodean SF, Issue 231, 2017
“A Man Full of Shadows,” originally published in Dying & Other Stories, Fiction4All, 2018
“Playback, Jury of the Heart,” originally published in Playback, Jury of the Heart, Fiction4All, 2017
ISBN-13 978-1-946154-31-6 (Paperback)
ISBN-13 978-1-946154-32-3 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948950
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover, book design, and interior art by Tricia Reeks
Printed in the United States of America
Published in the United States of America by
Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia
www.meerkatpress.com
For the stories we yearn to tell, the diversity of our voices. I am many, betwixt, a sum of cultures.
FOREWORD
SEB DOUBINSKY
To write a foreword for a collection such as Eugen Bacon’s The Road to Woop Woop is actually quite the impossible task. Impossible not because of the collection itself, which is perfect and masterly sewn together, but rather because of the sheer impossibility of describing, albeit introducing, such a beautiful writing craft. Eugen Bacon doesn’t only write stories, she assembles them like strange, out-of-worldly objects, that both feel familiar and yet radically uncanny.
Many reviewers have noted the natural ties to Octavia Butler—another masterful storyteller—but Eugen Bacon is, in my eyes, idiosyncratic. Her Blackness does not come through style, reference or identities, but through a vision, a peculiar way of looking at the world from another supernatural perspective, which encompasses all traditional narratives. Her magic is her own, family-inherited, homegrown and yet universal. We have all encountered her ghosts, murderers, creatures and witches, but only notice them now.
To write a foreword to this collection is only, in my eyes, adding superfluous words to stories that do not contain any. Everything is narrated sparsely, in an economy of vocabulary and descriptions that only someone like Shirley Jackson could achieve—in a completely different universe, of course. The only fitting intro of Eugen Bacon’s collection can solely be done through music.
I read The Road to Woop Woop listening to a fabulous free-jazz album by a much unknown musician, Sam Rivers. No music could have been better: the mix of melodies and deconstructed improvisations, the broken-up dialogue between instruments, the ever-flowing textures mingling or moving away from each other, everything seemed to accompany perfectly the patchwork of styles, stories and narratives contained in the book.
Like a free-jazz musician, Eugen Bacon will capture the reader’s mind by mutually associating and dissociating narratives and characters, but launching on short, relevant flashbacks or digressions, by adding the right amount of unsaid to what is being told.
In my eyes, The Road to Woop Woop is both a modern classic and a fabulous and unforgettable free-jazz album of magical dimensions.
—Seb Doubinsky, author of the City-State Cycle series
she lives out woop woop a noplace filled with ghosts
random within her grasp slipping in a language of desert
a mirage of memory in the middle of nowhere the back
of beyond unloved by the camera who stands a chance
THE ROAD TO WOOP WOOP
Tumbling down the stretch, a confident glide, the 4WD is a beaut, over nineteen years old.
The argument is brand-new. Maps are convolutions, complicated like relationships. You scrunch the sheet, push it in the glovebox. You feel River’s displeasure, but you hate navigating, and right now you don’t care.
The wiper swishes to and fro, braves unseasonal rain. You and River maintain your silence.
Rain. More rain.
“When’s the next stop?” River tries. Sidewise glance, cautious smile. He is muscled, dark. Dreadlocks fall down high cheekbones to square shoulders. Eyes like black gold give him the rugged look of a mechanic.
“Does it matter?” you say.
“Should it?”
You don’t respond. Turn your head, stare at a thin scratch on your window. The crack runs level with rolling landscape racing away with rain. Up in the sky, a billow of cloud like a white ghoul, dark-eyed and yawning into a scream.
A shoot of spray through River’s window brushes your cheek.
A glide of eye. “Hell’s the matter?” you say.
“You ask me-e. Something bothering you?”
“The window.”
He gives you a look.
Classic, you think. But you know that if you listen long enough, every argument is an empty road that attracts unfinished business. It’s an iceberg full of whimsy about fumaroles and geysers. It’s a corpse that spends eternity reliving apparitions of itself in the throes of death. Your fights are puffed-up trivia, championed to crusades. You fill up teabags with animus that pours into kettles of disarray, scalding as missiles. They leave you ashy and scattered—that’s what’s left of your lovemaking, or the paranoia of it, you wonder about that.
More silence, the cloud of your argument hangs above it. He shrugs. Rolls up his window. Still air swells in the car.
“Air con working?” you say.
He flexes long corduroyed legs that end in moccasins. Flicks on the air button—and the radio. The bars of a soulful number, a remix by some new artist, give way to an even darker track titled ‘Nameless.’ It’s about a high priest who wears skinny black jeans and thrums heavy metal to bring space demons into a church that’s dressed as a concert. And the torments join in evensong, chanting psalms and canticles until daybreak when the demons wisp back into thin air, fading with them thirteen souls of the faithful, an annual pact with the priest.
Rain pelts the roof and windows like a drum.
He hums. Your face is distant. You might well be strangers, tossed into a tight drive from Broome to Kununurra.
The lilt of his voice merges with the somber melody.
You turn your face upward. A drift of darkness, even with full day, is approaching from the skies. Now it’s half-light. You flip the sun visor down. Not for compulsion or vanity, nothing like an urge to peer at yourself in the mirror. Perhaps it’s to busy your hands, to distract yourself, keep from bedevilment—the kind that pulls out a quarrel. You steal a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Deep, deep eyes. They gleam like a cat’s. The soft curtain of your fringe is softening, despite thickset brows like a man’s. You feel disconnected with yourself, with the trip, with River. You flip the sun visor up.
Now the world is all grim. River turns on the headlights, but visibility is still bad. A bolt of lightning. You both see the arms of a reaching tree that has appeared on the road,
right there in your path. You squeal, throw your arms out. River swerves. A slam of brakes. A screech of tires. Boom!
The world stops in a swallowing blackness. Inside the hollow, your ears are ringing. The car, fully intact, is shooting out of the dark cloud in slow motion, picking up speed. It’s soaring along the road washed in a new aurora of lavender, turquoise and silver, then it’s all clear. A gentle sun breaks through fluffs of cloud no more engulfed in blackness. You level yourself with a hand on the dashboard, uncertain what exactly happened.
You look at River. His hands . . . wrist up . . . he has no hands. Nothing bloody as you’d expect from a man with severed wrists. Just empty space where the arms end.
But River’s unperturbed, his arms positioned as if he’s driving, even while nothing is touching the steering that’s moving itself, turning and leveling.
“Brought my shades?” he asks.
“Your hands,” you say.
“What about them?”
“Can’t you see?”
His glance is full of impatience.
You sink back to your seat, unable to understand it, unclear to tell him, as the driverless car races along in silence down the lone road.