Black Moon: Graphic Speculative Flash Fiction

by Eugen Bacon, Elena Betti (Illustrations)

Black Moon is an illustrated collection of speculative flash fiction interspersed with prose poetry. It carries themes of love and war, life and the afterlife, hope and despair. It is a philosophical assortment that questions normalcy, embraces opposition, and takes a keen interest on peculiarity. It will appeal to curious lovers of literary dark fantasy and all places in between.

Genres: Horror

72 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2020

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Eugen Bacon’s speculative flash fiction and prose poetry, with its dark, hauntingly disturbing themes and reflections, which continue to echo through my mind days after I read the final story, is both thought-provoking and enchanting. The eloquence of her writing is made even more powerful by Elena Betti’s graphics which accompany each piece, images which capture so evocatively the already vivid word-pictures. As I alternated between reading and looking, looking and reading, I discovered that each experience fed into the other and that the more I read and looked, the more I was able to perceive in each. I felt totally captivated by the magical alchemy I was witnessing – an unforgettable experience.
Thank you for my copy, Eugen – this truly is a book to treasure.

[Kris Ashton · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the literary establishment has long valued form and language ahead of ideas and plot, the post-modernist movement really brought that school of thought to the fore, and, over the past 20 years, it has played an increasingly eminent role in the way critics evaluate literary work. Authors who wish to garner attention often need to break conventions, use uncommon methods, and approach their subject matter from oblique angles.

This likely explains, in part, Eugen Bacon’s meteoric rise to prominence in the past few years. She occupies a sparsely populated patch where speculative fiction and highbrow literature intersect and, even though she has published fiction on and off since 2006, her output during 2017-2020 was prolific, encompassing dozens of stories, novellas, essays, reviews, and even an academic text analysing speculative fiction.

A poetic sensibility has always been a feature of Bacon’s fiction no matter how prosaic (even when “slumming it” as Ivory Snow, the nom de plume under which she published her SF-romance novella Playback, Jury of the Heart). She savours language, wallows and indulges in it, pushes words to their limits in an effort to see the world in fresh ways, or create a world that never was. Flash fiction would seem to be the perfect outlet for her talents, then: a union between poetry and speculative fiction that has the potential to produce lavish hybrid offspring. Which brings us to Black Moon.

It’s a petite collection of fictive contemplations, each mind-bending vignette accompanied to considerable effect by Elena Betti’s photo-realistic yet otherworldly illustrations. The somewhat oxymoronic title accurately foreshadows the murky and oftentimes disconcerting expeditions into the peculiar that lie within the book’s pages.

The reader never knows what’s coming next, in fact, a characteristic that is paramount among Black Moon’s many dark delights. “Damaged Beyond Words” and “A Profound Wonder” upbraid modern society for caring more about the ersatz technological existence we’ve created than the genuine article. This pessimistic (even misanthropic) view of humanity sits cheek-by-jowl with speculative fiction of the more traditional high-concept type—as in the vampire tale “Moments Become Games” or the creeping Body Snatchers horror of “The Replacements”—and symbolic meditations on Trump-era activism (“The Real Deal”).

Other pieces deliver unique perspectives on speculative fiction tropes. “Like a Dog with a Bone” revisits the haunted house archetype and gives it a cutting metaphorical edge; “Cinders in Her Hair” explores the dark mental passages of a girl who has just burned down her high school with teachers and students inside. “The scientist at heart tossed a match,” Bacon explains, “and held dominion over life and death, as orange flames roared in her eyes.”

Observed as a whole, Black Moon is a jungle of words and images, with themes that are similarly unpredictable and cornucopian. Those familiar with Bacon’s previous work won’t be surprised to find meditations on dangerous or corrupted love (“It’s All in the Plan”) and alienation (“Unlearning the Sea”), but the author also touches on climate change, feminism, existentialism, and that favourite post-modernist topic, the illegitimacy of deeming anything “normal.”

While it is Bacon’s off-kilter and surreal use of language that seems to most enamour her admirers, I’ve always found her at her most effective when she eases off the cerebral word games and lets the prose flow. Take this simple image from “A Winter Masterpiece”: “She couldn’t decide what to do with her heart: so she laid it on a garland of new flowers on a grave.” Or how about this line from “An Unnamed Story,” a body-horror vignette that would make Clive Barker wince: “But what collapsed onto her sanitary pad was a little creature, then another, little flies with eyes and human ears, bleeding and bleeding out of her until the horror of blood begot a beast.”

Whatever the perceived merits of Bacon’s “poetic microprose” (as the book’s blurb describes it), readers who enjoyed the author’s past work, particularly Dying & Other Stories, will find a great deal to pore over and appreciate in Black Moon. It is Eugen Bacon at her most concise and lyrical, her most experimental, yet all the while keeping her hallmark speculative sensibilities intact.

[This review first appeared in Andromeda Spaceways magazine.]

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a slim collection of prose poetry and illustrations, an early work from Bacon whose language I normally devour but which feels a little less focussed here. Partly, this is my bias against the form, partly that I feel she is flexing this early talent. I enjoyed the read, but prefer her more substantive work.

[Clare Rhoden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully presented book of illustrated short fiction. The magic of these words will pierce your soul. I read an early version and am thrilled to now have the delicious paperback.
Sigh. Divine!