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New Review: Black Moon: Graphic Speculative Flash Fiction by Eugen Bacon, illustrated by Elena Betti

cover art for Black Moon by Eugen Bacon and Elena Betti

Black Moon: Graphic Speculative Flash Fiction by Eugen Bacon, illustrated by Elena Betti

IFWG Publishing, 2020

ISBN: 978-1925956658

Available: Paperback  ( Amazon.com )

 

With evocative illustrations and fabulous cover art by Elena Betti, the soft-hued blue pages of Black Moon by Eugen Bacon invite us to experience a pastiche of speculative poetry, prose, narratives and images. The titles of this collection of short pieces, such as “Cinders in Her Hair,” “Unlearning the Sea,” and “The Book of Unfinished Parables,” spark the imagination and tease the intellect. The widely diverse themes run from societal issues to personal experience and even fantasy. The tone varies from serious, to playful, to philosophical, to dark. Eugen clearly has eclectic interests and tastes and reveals them in an uninhibited, relatively unstructured fashion.

 

The poetic hybrids Eugen experiments with are definitely worth extra attention, but they seem to be in the middle of development. It is difficult to discern whether Bacon intentionally leaves the reader to her own devices in creating meaning in Black Moon or whether that effect is inadvertently caused by the writer’s artistic choices. Some of the pieces are quick snapshots of moments or ideas, but they do not include that particular magic of word choice or arrangement which little gems require. Other pieces are a bit longer and provide more context but seem unsatisfyingly without purpose or incomplete in some vague way.

 

Reading this book is like taking a stroll through a dream in which you recognize familiar objects but realize they are somehow out of context. It is also, at times, like reading a book in another language and trying to figure out a word you don’t know by comparing it to words that seem similar but end up having quite a different meaning. This abstract quality has its charm: eyes that are “serenading” and that are “shifting” “like an opal,” but sometimes it is just confusing: a window that “floundered” back to “her” house where she “locked herself to” tears.

 

Overall, Black Moon is a visual fusion that projects the author’s vision in such a way that the writer’s words become more concrete for the reader and the illustrations become more meaningful for the viewer. This is a natural synthesis that has the potential to evolve into a form that lovers of both poetry and art will enjoy.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Posted on March 11, 2021 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Of One Blood: The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins, edited by Eric J. Guignard and Leslie Klinger, introduction by Nisi Shawl

cover art of Of One Blood: The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins

Of One Blood: The Hidden Self  (Haunted Library Horror Classics) by Pauline Hopkins, edited by Eric J. Guignard and Leslie S. Klinger, introduction by Nisi Shawl

Poisoned Pen Press, 2021

ISBN-13 : 978-1464215063

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

This new edition of Of One Blood is part of a series published by Poisoned Pen Press in partnership with the Horror Writers of America.  Author Pauline Hopkins was an African-American writer of the early 20th century,  and Nisi Shawl introduces the book, originally published in chapters as a serial in The Colored American magazine during 1902-1903, as an early speculative fiction novel combining the popular genre of “society novels” with a “lost world” narrative. revolutionary because the “lost world” is an advanced society consisting entirely of Black individuals, and promoting the thesis, novel at the time, that Africa is where the arts and technology have their origins.

Set in Boston in 1891 (my best guess based on the footnotes), Reuel Briggs is an impoverished medical student passing as white who is obsessed with the hidden forces of the supernatural and how to control them enough to reanimate the recently dead (shades of Victor Frankenstein). He is given the opportunity to put his theories into practice when the beautiful African-American singer Dianthe Lusk is killed in a car accident. While he is successful at bringing her back to life, she has lost her memory, and Reuel, his wealthy friend Aubrey, and Aubrey’s fiance Molly, set out to rebuild her into a new person. Molly becomes close friends with Dianthe, and Dianthe and Reuel fall in love and marry. To support her, he appeals to Aubrey for help in finding work. Aubrey, secretly in love with Dianthe, gets Reuel to sign on to a two year expedition to Africa to get him out of the way so he can marry Dianthe himself.

As Reuel journeys through Africa he sees its greatness, vividly described by Hopkins. The white men he is traveling with are surprised and at first dismayed to realize that African civilizations and peoples are the cradle of culture, as they have always believed that Africans were lesser than white people. Through Aubrey’s machinations, Reuel and Dianthe receive letters informing them that the other is dead, but while Reuel’s supernatural and mystical powers grow,  Dianthe feels more and more lost and traumatized, especially as she learns more about her tangled family tree.

There are many books now that deal with the intergenerational trauma, tangled family trees, and family separation caused by slavery, including Octavia Butler’s speculative novel Kindred,  Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, and Maisy Card’s These Ghosts Are Family.  In Of One Blood, we see a fantastical, awe-inspiring world, that contrasts the glories of African civilization rising again with the results of  the terrible treatment, taken for granted, of African-Americans. Dianthe in particular goes through unbelievable trauma: she is killed, re-animated, separated from everything she knows, nearly drowned, grieving a friend and a husband, and under tremendous pressure from Aubrey already, when the additional information about her family comes to light. In her case, it only takes one generation to destabilize her and poison her interactions with her environment. Shawl described this novel as science fiction, but to me it seems more to combine the “lost world”  utopian narrative Reuel experiences in Africa with the Gothic horror experienced by Dianthe.

Occasional footnotes are helpful in dating the time period of the book and understanding vocabulary and literary references. A brief but detailed biographical note about the author,  discussion questions, and a wide-ranging list of recommended further reading follow the story.

This is a good choice for readers interested in the beginnings of Afrofuturism and African-American speculative fiction and horror, Gothic horror, lost world and utopian narratives, and early 20th century African-American and women writers. In addition, Of One Blood would be a unique choice for the increasing number of book clubs focusing on anti-racist titles, which, in my experience, generally avoid genre fiction. Highly recommended.

Contains: incest

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

 

 

Posted on February 15, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

cover art for The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin   (   Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com  )

Orbit, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0316509848

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

The City We Became is the first book in a trilogy based on a short story by N.K. Jemisin titled “The City Born Great”, which focused on a young homeless Black man who becomes the avatar for New York City as it literally comes alive, and successfully battles a cosmic attack aimed at killing the city at great expense to himself.

The book begins after the events of the story, and if you haven’t read the story the beginning may be a little disorienting. The exhausted avatar of New York City, who sustained significant damage to himself, is hidden away and sleeping. It turns out that one person is not enough to sustain the life of an entire city. The five boroughs of New York, each with a distinct character, each have an avatar come alive that can defend their borough, and when they come together, they will be able to find and wake the avatar for New York City with their combined strength. They just have to find each other, choose to take on the responsibility of being their city as well as themselves, and overcome the “Woman in White,” a powerful representative from a cosmic force in an alternate reality. With one exception they are a colorful, multiracial, and argumentative group, but when push comes to shove, they are all New Yorkers who stand together. Manhattan is a younger, gay man who developed amnesia when he entered the city, but who obviously had a background steeped in violence.  He has come to New York to work on a graduate degree in political science. Brooklyn is an older Black woman who was a rap artist in the early years of rap music but is now a mother and member of the city council. The Bronx is a no-nonsense part-Lenape feminist lesbian professor of fine arts who directs a nonprofit arts center for marginalized artists and members of the community. Queens is an undocumented Indian student with a gift for math who is interning on Wall Street in hopes of gaining a path to citizenship.

But Staten Island stands back from the rest of the city. She is a young white woman living in a conventional family with a father who is an abusive, xenophobic, racist cop and a mother who is a passive alcoholic housewife. She barely qualifies to work at the library, and has been cautioned about the awful people in the city and the terrible things that could happen to her there.  When someone encourages her to read Lovecraft, his work confirms for her what “those people” are like (anyone who has ever said “it’s just fiction, not life” please take note). Despite the awful things that have happened to her within the walls of her own home (ranging from smashed self-esteen to attempted rape), she is more concerned with keeping others out than escaping it herself. As a white woman, it was heartbreaking for me to see her ignorance and obvious complicity with not just human but cosmic evil. I’m not familiar with Staten Island, but I really hope the portrayal here is not totally congruent with reality,

In The City We Became, extradimensional evil has grown more complex: better at planning in a way that, when cities begin to come alive, groundwork to kill it is already in place. The art gallery is attacked online by alt-right “artists” funded by a clearly sinister foundation led by the “Woman in White”, resulting in the staff getting doxxed and recieving death threats, and the building nearly burned down (this part of the book is terrifying). Brooklyn and her family are evicted from property they own outright by the same foundation, in the name of gentrification. Every chain store that replaced a community institution and changed the character of the boroughs and the city is killing it. Will Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens be able to revive the avatar of New York and save the city without the help of Staten Island, or will the city die, to be replaced with something more sinister and destructive?

While The City We Became touched on a lot of important issues (gentrification being a big one) it is also a love letter to New York City and its boroughs. Seeing the people Jemisin imagined as being these cities brought a new vividness into the way I think about the city and I loved meeting her main characters. I do feel like this book left a lot of loose ends. Who is Manhattan, really? Will we see more of his roommate? Where will the homeless avatar for New York go next? What finally happens to Staten Island? How do things change for the avatars when they go back to their daily lives? This is the first book in a trilogy, so I hope we’ll find out shortly.  Recommended.

 

Contains: attempted rape, domestic abuse, violence, racism, body horror, tentacles

 

Posted on September 29, 2020 by , Reply
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