Danged Black Thing

FINALIST FOR THE PHILIP K. DICK AWARD

Danged Black Thing is an extraordinary collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, patriarchy and womanhood, from a remarkable and original voice. Traversing the West and Africa, they celebrate the author’s hybridity with breathtaking sensuousness and lyricism.

Simbiyu wins a scholarship to study in Australia, but cannot leave behind a world of walking barefoot, the orange sun, and his longing for a “once pillow-soft mother.” In his past, darkness rose from the river and something nameless and mystical continues to envelop his life. In “A Taste of Unguja” sweet taarab music, full of want, seeps into a mother’s life on the streets of Melbourne as she evokes the powers of her ancestors to seek vengeance on her cursed ex. In the cyberfunk of “Unlimited Data” Natukunda, a village woman, gives her all for her family in Old Kampala. Other stories explore what happens when the water runs dry—and who pays, capture the devastating effects on women and children of societies in which men hold all the power, and themes of being, belonging, and otherness.

Speculative, realistic, and even mythological, but always imbued with truth, empathy, and Blackness, Danged Black Thing is a literary knockout.

Table of Contents

• "Simbiyu and the Nameless"
• "The Water Runner"
• "Phantasms of Existence"
• "Unlimited Data"
• "A Pod of Mermaids"
• "When the Water Stops"
• "A Strange Communion"
• "Messier 94"
• "Still She Visits"
• "A Visit in Whitechapel"
• "The Failing Name"
• "The Widow's Rooster"
• "Rain Doesn't Fall on One Roof"
• "Danged Black Thing"
• "De Turtle O'Hades"
• "A Taste of Ungua"
• "Forgotten Toolern"

About the Author

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections. She’s a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, a British Fantasy Award finalist, a Foreword Book of the Year silver award winner, and was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing by Transit Lounge Publishing was a finalist in the BSFA, Foreword, Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards, and made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Eugen’s creative work has appeared worldwide, including in Apex Magazine, Award Winning Australian Writing, Fantasy Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. Visit her website at eugenbacon.com and Twitter feed at @EugenBacon

Reviews

"With poetic prose, an eclectic range of subgenres, and affecting observations on Blackness and womanhood, this collection showcases Bacon at the top of her game." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“The writing is bold, sensual, breathtakingly good.” —Angela Savage

“Her writing is equal parts fecund earth and fine-cut jewels; her stories juxtapose the scarred and abused with the powerfully magical, the numinous and the deceptively mundane.” —Margo Lanagan

Excerpt

The color is full of shade and smells like crusts of fruit. Crushed guavas, warm wet clay—that's the sweetness and mushiness about the forest. A tepidness too. And then there's a whiff of soured yam, unwashed body. Something old sniffling in the shadows. 

Eyes pore over your hollow within, ticking, ticking with your heartbeat. But the hollow is dead cassava dry—all surface and dust. What sound will fall when you press your ear to its longing? Perhaps nuances of self-reflection beckoning the moon's return. 

You are eighteen months old.

A crunch of tires, then squeals of children tumbling out of a foreign car. Your mother owns sandals but likes to walk barefoot. This is how she greets Aunt Prim, who is layered in batiks and swirling in a smell of flowers. She's approaching the boma under the blaze of an orange sun. Your cousins, Tatu and Saba, are giggling, whispering, nudging each other. 

"Abana banu! These children!" Aunt Prim is all sharpness. Sharp eyes, sharp nose, sharp ears. "I heard what you said!"

She grabs a stick from the ground, makes to chase your cousins, but platform shoes don't take her far. Her tongue clicks. Her stick waves from the distance. Aunt Prim is nothing like you know. Because your mother is pillow-soft, her voice tender like the feathers of a baby bird. She's hooked you on her arm, your fat legs astride her waist. Her sweet brown eyes, her dancing dimples. She smells of sugar bananas—small and thin-skinned—on her chest where you rest your head. 

"Sissy Prim. What do you bring us from the city?"

"Flour, sugar, and these two urchins. Look at them."

"Doing what?"

"Mischief. Can't you see?"

"Don't run it up. They are young. See how you make them hush like spirits."

"Evil ones."

Silence, then a scatter of feet. Titters spilling everywhere, as your cousins stampede around the hut in a shroud of dust. 

Read More from Eugen Bacon

"Simbiyu and the Nameless" - Issue 131 of Apex Magazine

"Memories of the Old Sun" - Issue 140 of Apex Magazine

"Kizimbani" - Issue 146 of Apex Magazine