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Muntu
ONE MAN. TWIN SOULS. AN UNQUENCHABLE BEAST.
It is a muntu—a trapped spirit in the island of the dead. This creature of legend becomes a deadly reality when a killer strikes the heart of Sydney.
The victims seem unconnected, yet Investigating Officer Ivory Tembo is convinced the killings are anything but random.
The case soon leads Ivory into places she never imagined. In order to stop the killings and save the life of the man she loves, she must reach deep into her past, uncover secrets of her heritage, break a demon’s curse, and somehow unify two worlds.
It is a muntu—a trapped spirit in the island of the dead. This creature of legend becomes a deadly reality when a killer strikes the heart of Sydney.
The victims seem unconnected, yet Investigating Officer Ivory Tembo is convinced the killings are anything but random.
The case soon leads Ivory into places she never imagined. In order to stop the killings and save the life of the man she loves, she must reach deep into her past, uncover secrets of her heritage, break a demon’s curse, and somehow unify two worlds.
154 pages, Paperback
First published May 12, 2026
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May 1, 2026I received this book through NetGalley.
Muntu was a tough one for me to settle into. It felt like one bigger story told through a series of smaller connected pieces, and once that finally started to click, it made more sense. But even at only 154 pages, this book somehow still managed to give me reading whiplash.
Even so, the atmosphere stood out. The writing felt rich, mythic, and very intentional, with folklore, sacred history, and deeper meaning woven through it. You can tell this book is doing a lot.
I did struggled with the overall reading experience. The time jumps, shifting threads, and fragmented structure kept pulling me out instead of pulling me in. Mostly, I felt like I was trying to catch up to the story instead of moving through it. For such a short book, it felt dense and slippery, and I never felt fully grounded even when I could see what it was trying to do.
Overall, I respected what Muntu was aiming for. I’d recommend it to readers who like literary speculative fiction, layered folklore, and books that care more about atmosphere and structure than a straightforward plot.
Muntu was a tough one for me to settle into. It felt like one bigger story told through a series of smaller connected pieces, and once that finally started to click, it made more sense. But even at only 154 pages, this book somehow still managed to give me reading whiplash.
Even so, the atmosphere stood out. The writing felt rich, mythic, and very intentional, with folklore, sacred history, and deeper meaning woven through it. You can tell this book is doing a lot.
I did struggled with the overall reading experience. The time jumps, shifting threads, and fragmented structure kept pulling me out instead of pulling me in. Mostly, I felt like I was trying to catch up to the story instead of moving through it. For such a short book, it felt dense and slippery, and I never felt fully grounded even when I could see what it was trying to do.
Overall, I respected what Muntu was aiming for. I’d recommend it to readers who like literary speculative fiction, layered folklore, and books that care more about atmosphere and structure than a straightforward plot.
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June 2, 2026A Whole Cosmos, and the Crow Still Got the Sandwich
TL;DR: Bacon builds a cosmos that rips worlds off their roots and sings the dead dirt back into bloom, then proves the holiest thing in it was never the world but the voice. Muntu sags whenever it plays cop, but its myth, its dread, and its garbage-bag orphan wreck you. Saturated, strange, occasionally homework. Mostly a marvel.
There is a crow early in Muntu that walks up to a foster kid eating a coconut-jam sandwich, stares her down like a weaponed bandit, lifts the whole triangle out of her hand, eats it peck by peck, and then, before it flaps off, gives her a parting look of complete disdain. At what, the kid wonders. I wondered too. And I knew right there that Eugen Bacon can see, and that the seeing is most of the reason to be in this book at all.
That is what Muntu is before it is anything else: a sustained act of looking, rendered in prose so saturated it leaves a stain on your fingers. Bacon does not describe a sky, she tells you the sound went tri-color. She does not say a world died, she shows you a patch of land that tore itself off the Earth in grief and flung itself past two asteroid belts to sulk in the moon’s orbit, and then she shows you the people stranded on it singing the dead red dirt back into bloom. Singing. They sing of the green sea and the white sun and the gods who used to listen, and the song feeds the galaxy until it blossoms. I have read stacks of fantasy that want me to feel worldmaking is holy. This is the rare one that pulled it off, because it understood the holy thing was never the world. It was the voice.
So here is the engine. A killer is loose in Sydney. Men turn up clawed open inside and out and dusted in ash hard as diamond, the women beside them left alive but scooped hollow, not one word left in any of them. Detective Inspector Ivory Tembo, who used to be a foster kid named Izett with everything she owned in a garbage bag, does not believe in seers and goes hunting one anyway, because she has run out of everything else to try. Under the procedure sits a myth older than the city: a beautiful outcast burned alive for loving the wrong twin, and a soul that came apart in the fire. One half went looking for the woman he loved. The other half is the thing in Sydney, and it is hungry, and it cannot find its missing piece, and it is taking the city apart in the search.
That is a hell of a lot of book. Afro-surreal myth welded to a noir welded to an interdimensional quest, body horror and folk horror and grief all idling at once. When Bacon keeps her hands on the myth and the dread, it moves like nothing else on the 2026 shelf.
The trouble, and the reason this is a recommend-with-caveats and not a thing I shove into your chest, is that the books inside Muntu are not equally alive. The myth is alive. The orphan is alive. The detective is the one that sags. When Bacon drops into the Sydney cop machinery, the barking superintendent, the wisecracking partner who calls Ivory “Whitey,” the budget meeting played for laughs, the prose stops singing and starts filling out paperwork. It is competent procedure and I did not give a single damn about it, and every page of it I spent missing the red dirt and the song.
The book is scariest, oddly, when it quits being a crime novel and lets the cosmos go wrong. There is a long stretch in a courtly place where bodies twitch impaled on spires, where a drugged feast goes on a few courses too long, where a king’s face keeps rearranging itself and a baby crown prince watches Ivory with a hatred she mentally captions: smiles when ravenous for flesh. That is the best dread in the book. Dread with manners. The worst kind. It frightened me in a way the actual murders, lurid as they are, never quite managed, because the murders are described and that courtly horror is felt.
I should warn you that Bacon has no reverse gear on a sentence, and mostly that is the gift. There is a passage where the prose itself starts doubling, the same moment told once in past tense and once in present as Ivory comes apart at that poisoned table, and I could not tell you whether it is the most controlled thing in the book or a printer’s accident. I read it as deliberate. I am fairly sure the ambiguity is the point. Other times the reaching is just reaching, one more color, one more flower named, the catalog of flora and fauna tipping from hypnotic into homework. The same hand that gives you the crow gives you a paragraph you have to wade.
And under all of it is the garbage bag. The tiny photo of herself in a bassinet, the rag doll named Janey, the chocolate bar a dying friend tells her she earned by being brave with the needle. A toy elephant pressed into a weeping foster dad’s hands with the line, she wants a cuddle. I will confess the orphan got me worse than any of the monsters. The whole cosmic apparatus, the demons and the galaxies, is finally just scaffolding around one tired girl who wanted to be allowed to stay somewhere, and Bacon knows it, and she is right.
The ending chooses tenderness. It resolves, it gathers everyone into one room, it ties the knot gently after all that vastness and grief. Whether that lands on you depends entirely on what you walked in wanting. I wanted the frayed thing and got the warm one, and I cannot pretend I wasn’t a little let down, and I also cannot pretend the warmth wasn’t earned.
Bacon is worth knowing whatever you make of this one. Born Eugen Matoyo in Tanzania, a computer scientist before she was a writer, now an African Australian out of Melbourne who calls herself the queen of genre bending and is not wrong. She is reviews editor at Aurealis, a twice World Fantasy finalist, a British Fantasy and Locus and Ignyte winner, a Philip K. Dick and Shirley Jackson and Nommo finalist, with the novel Serengotti shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her obsessions are all over Muntu: family and roots and loss, and above all sound as a kind of magic, the same fixation that drives her Sauutiverse stories where people work spells out of song. Here is the wrinkle worth knowing before you buy. Muntu carries the subtitle Ivory’s Story, which is the title Bacon published as a novella through NewCon Press back in 2020, so what Bad Hand Books, Todd Keisling’s indie horror house, has put out in 2026 reads as that earlier book brought back and handed a bigger frame.
Bacon built a whole cosmos that rips worlds off their roots and sings them back into bloom, and the thing that actually wrecked me was a little girl with a garbage bag who just wanted to be allowed to stay.
TL;DR: Bacon builds a cosmos that rips worlds off their roots and sings the dead dirt back into bloom, then proves the holiest thing in it was never the world but the voice. Muntu sags whenever it plays cop, but its myth, its dread, and its garbage-bag orphan wreck you. Saturated, strange, occasionally homework. Mostly a marvel.
There is a crow early in Muntu that walks up to a foster kid eating a coconut-jam sandwich, stares her down like a weaponed bandit, lifts the whole triangle out of her hand, eats it peck by peck, and then, before it flaps off, gives her a parting look of complete disdain. At what, the kid wonders. I wondered too. And I knew right there that Eugen Bacon can see, and that the seeing is most of the reason to be in this book at all.
That is what Muntu is before it is anything else: a sustained act of looking, rendered in prose so saturated it leaves a stain on your fingers. Bacon does not describe a sky, she tells you the sound went tri-color. She does not say a world died, she shows you a patch of land that tore itself off the Earth in grief and flung itself past two asteroid belts to sulk in the moon’s orbit, and then she shows you the people stranded on it singing the dead red dirt back into bloom. Singing. They sing of the green sea and the white sun and the gods who used to listen, and the song feeds the galaxy until it blossoms. I have read stacks of fantasy that want me to feel worldmaking is holy. This is the rare one that pulled it off, because it understood the holy thing was never the world. It was the voice.
So here is the engine. A killer is loose in Sydney. Men turn up clawed open inside and out and dusted in ash hard as diamond, the women beside them left alive but scooped hollow, not one word left in any of them. Detective Inspector Ivory Tembo, who used to be a foster kid named Izett with everything she owned in a garbage bag, does not believe in seers and goes hunting one anyway, because she has run out of everything else to try. Under the procedure sits a myth older than the city: a beautiful outcast burned alive for loving the wrong twin, and a soul that came apart in the fire. One half went looking for the woman he loved. The other half is the thing in Sydney, and it is hungry, and it cannot find its missing piece, and it is taking the city apart in the search.
That is a hell of a lot of book. Afro-surreal myth welded to a noir welded to an interdimensional quest, body horror and folk horror and grief all idling at once. When Bacon keeps her hands on the myth and the dread, it moves like nothing else on the 2026 shelf.
The trouble, and the reason this is a recommend-with-caveats and not a thing I shove into your chest, is that the books inside Muntu are not equally alive. The myth is alive. The orphan is alive. The detective is the one that sags. When Bacon drops into the Sydney cop machinery, the barking superintendent, the wisecracking partner who calls Ivory “Whitey,” the budget meeting played for laughs, the prose stops singing and starts filling out paperwork. It is competent procedure and I did not give a single damn about it, and every page of it I spent missing the red dirt and the song.
The book is scariest, oddly, when it quits being a crime novel and lets the cosmos go wrong. There is a long stretch in a courtly place where bodies twitch impaled on spires, where a drugged feast goes on a few courses too long, where a king’s face keeps rearranging itself and a baby crown prince watches Ivory with a hatred she mentally captions: smiles when ravenous for flesh. That is the best dread in the book. Dread with manners. The worst kind. It frightened me in a way the actual murders, lurid as they are, never quite managed, because the murders are described and that courtly horror is felt.
I should warn you that Bacon has no reverse gear on a sentence, and mostly that is the gift. There is a passage where the prose itself starts doubling, the same moment told once in past tense and once in present as Ivory comes apart at that poisoned table, and I could not tell you whether it is the most controlled thing in the book or a printer’s accident. I read it as deliberate. I am fairly sure the ambiguity is the point. Other times the reaching is just reaching, one more color, one more flower named, the catalog of flora and fauna tipping from hypnotic into homework. The same hand that gives you the crow gives you a paragraph you have to wade.
And under all of it is the garbage bag. The tiny photo of herself in a bassinet, the rag doll named Janey, the chocolate bar a dying friend tells her she earned by being brave with the needle. A toy elephant pressed into a weeping foster dad’s hands with the line, she wants a cuddle. I will confess the orphan got me worse than any of the monsters. The whole cosmic apparatus, the demons and the galaxies, is finally just scaffolding around one tired girl who wanted to be allowed to stay somewhere, and Bacon knows it, and she is right.
The ending chooses tenderness. It resolves, it gathers everyone into one room, it ties the knot gently after all that vastness and grief. Whether that lands on you depends entirely on what you walked in wanting. I wanted the frayed thing and got the warm one, and I cannot pretend I wasn’t a little let down, and I also cannot pretend the warmth wasn’t earned.
Bacon is worth knowing whatever you make of this one. Born Eugen Matoyo in Tanzania, a computer scientist before she was a writer, now an African Australian out of Melbourne who calls herself the queen of genre bending and is not wrong. She is reviews editor at Aurealis, a twice World Fantasy finalist, a British Fantasy and Locus and Ignyte winner, a Philip K. Dick and Shirley Jackson and Nommo finalist, with the novel Serengotti shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her obsessions are all over Muntu: family and roots and loss, and above all sound as a kind of magic, the same fixation that drives her Sauutiverse stories where people work spells out of song. Here is the wrinkle worth knowing before you buy. Muntu carries the subtitle Ivory’s Story, which is the title Bacon published as a novella through NewCon Press back in 2020, so what Bad Hand Books, Todd Keisling’s indie horror house, has put out in 2026 reads as that earlier book brought back and handed a bigger frame.
Bacon built a whole cosmos that rips worlds off their roots and sings them back into bloom, and the thing that actually wrecked me was a little girl with a garbage bag who just wanted to be allowed to stay.
June 7, 2026
3.0 ||dark reflective tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
The greatest strength of this work is its prose: it weaves a intricate picture of the many worlds that the buntu has touched and has left in shambles. As we follow our protagonist, Ivory, in pursuit of the spirit terrorizing the many worlds and universes, we also follow her parse through her trauma. Both journeys were integral to each other, and while the writing was hard to follow, it also reflects how non-linear one's journey with one's own trauma is. It's less of a concrete plot than it is a string of smaller stories coalescing into one, and I do wish we spent more time with a few characters to fully immerse ourselves in their work. For a story less than 200 pages long, it felt all too long and all too short.
Big thanks to the publisher for providing me this ARC via NetGalley. All quotes are taken from the uncorrected proof. This does not in any shape or form influence my review on this book.
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
"You don't have to wait for the fear to go. The fear never fully goes. But remember what I said, sometimes it takes a terrible fear to bring out your greatest strength."
The greatest strength of this work is its prose: it weaves a intricate picture of the many worlds that the buntu has touched and has left in shambles. As we follow our protagonist, Ivory, in pursuit of the spirit terrorizing the many worlds and universes, we also follow her parse through her trauma. Both journeys were integral to each other, and while the writing was hard to follow, it also reflects how non-linear one's journey with one's own trauma is. It's less of a concrete plot than it is a string of smaller stories coalescing into one, and I do wish we spent more time with a few characters to fully immerse ourselves in their work. For a story less than 200 pages long, it felt all too long and all too short.
Big thanks to the publisher for providing me this ARC via NetGalley. All quotes are taken from the uncorrected proof. This does not in any shape or form influence my review on this book.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Unfortunately, I do not believe I was the target audience for Muntu. I found the folklore elements and fantasy aspects to be very interesting, but I was incredibly confused for most of the novella.
Muntu uses non-linear timelines combined with heavy prose. It was very difficult to follow the thread of the plot and I found myself rushing through just to get to the end to hopefully make sense of what I was reading. Based on the blurb, I believed that it would be a more supernatural fantasy mixed with a crime thriller, but that was my mistake for misinterpreting the description of the novella. I still don't really understand what happened.
I felt the narrative left me with more questions than answers, which is not something I typically enjoy.
Muntu uses non-linear timelines combined with heavy prose. It was very difficult to follow the thread of the plot and I found myself rushing through just to get to the end to hopefully make sense of what I was reading. Based on the blurb, I believed that it would be a more supernatural fantasy mixed with a crime thriller, but that was my mistake for misinterpreting the description of the novella. I still don't really understand what happened.
I felt the narrative left me with more questions than answers, which is not something I typically enjoy.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Muntu is a very surreal story which quickly caught my interest. The descriptions were beautifully done and the author clearly has a skill for setting the scene and conveying very specific emotions and vibes that really immerse you in the story. The book could have benefitted from being a little longer with more exploration of certain characters as it felt like there wasn’t much to grow attached to for some of them. The descriptions sometimes felt a bit confusing too and a few times I wasn’t really sure what was supposed to be happening or who was speaking. Overall, it was an interesting story.
May 26, 2026
I struggled with making my way through this book, and wanted to DNF fairly early on, but made it about halfway through before I skimmed the rest. I felt the stories were very disjointed from one another.
My other main issue was the writing. The dialogue felt stunted and unrealistic. Sometimes, the pacing was too fast and instead of taking us through the characters' desires or thoughts, we got a summary of events. Classic telling-and-not-showing. The writing could use a lot of editing, to really flesh out the plot and build more character depth.
Thank you to Bad Hand Books, Netgalley, and the author for this ARC.
My other main issue was the writing. The dialogue felt stunted and unrealistic. Sometimes, the pacing was too fast and instead of taking us through the characters' desires or thoughts, we got a summary of events. Classic telling-and-not-showing. The writing could use a lot of editing, to really flesh out the plot and build more character depth.
Thank you to Bad Hand Books, Netgalley, and the author for this ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I found Muntu a bit disorienting at first, but gradually everything started coming together. I initially felt slightly disconnected from the writing because I was not familiar with many of the terms and their symbolic meanings.
That said, both the descriptions and the story were beautifully written. The writing style carried an ethereal quality that suited the story. The narrative was well developed and felt sweet and dark at the same time. I also loved how the story blended supernatural and murder mystery elements with cultural and mythological influences.
That said, both the descriptions and the story were beautifully written. The writing style carried an ethereal quality that suited the story. The narrative was well developed and felt sweet and dark at the same time. I also loved how the story blended supernatural and murder mystery elements with cultural and mythological influences.
May 12, 2026
A collection of different original stories that have some connection later, and sadly none worked for me. Don't have any emotional attachement, barely remember even main details after reading, the reading itself was hard to move through... I was no more interested in going further pretty soon, swiped through chapters, looked at other stories — still nothing. Hope this book find its audience, but seems like not in me.
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Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with this free eARC in exchange for my honest review!
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Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with this free eARC in exchange for my honest review!
February 15, 2026
Muntu reads like a folkloric classic, with rich prose and wonderful storytelling. A cross between parallel worlds and a detective murder mystery that flows like a wave of adventure. Looking forward to the continuation of this series.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The spirit of a man wronged in life returns and starts murdering seemingly unconnected people.
This reads less like a cohesive story than it does a group of short stories the author tried to bully into being one. It is disjointed and the prose borders on the purple.
Received via NetGalley.
This reads less like a cohesive story than it does a group of short stories the author tried to bully into being one. It is disjointed and the prose borders on the purple.
Received via NetGalley.
May 12, 2026
Exceptional story!!! I loved reading this book!!
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