Wake up, linger a moment longer in The place where weird things happen …
I give this book back to you, what will you find in this Place?

Dread, anguish, and hope are the driving forces behind Eugen Bacon’s dark speculative fiction collection, A Place Between Waking and Forgetting. Consisting of seventeen stories and a poetic introduction by Bram Stoker Award-winner Linda D. Addison (from which the epigraph above is taken), Bacon’s story is a surreal depiction of Black life across time and space.

Bacon herself describes the genre of A Place Between Waking and Forgetting as Afro-Irreal. In separate texts and interviews, she describes Afro-Irreal as literature that “demands trust and immersion in the impossible.” I am not sure the hyper-specific classification helped tie the stories together in a cohesive way, but the slipstream nature of her stories evoked a consistent sense of displacement and surrealism across each of them. It was akin to walking down a familiar road and suddenly realizing one has made the wrong turn. But in this case, the wrong turns are far more exciting than the familiar literary paths. As soon as I became comfortable with a story’s plot line, there was some unexpected stylistic or tonal shift that kept me on my toes. “A Place Between Waking and Forgetting,” for example, was a take on Sherlock Holmes, and stories like “The Fable of a Monkey Heart” and “The Lightning Bird” read like cautionary fables: these are familiar forms, but the stories are anything but.

Surrealism in this collection is both a genre, theme, and stylistic choice. This felt best reflected in “The Set,” in which radio host Jabari lives a “monochrome” life that suddenly experiences subtle anomalies and eventual multiverse shenanigans. I cackled at the absurd plot and stylistic choices, and I loved how unexpected that humor was. The story brought a lot of fun to an otherwise haunting collection in which many of the tales are difficult to summarize. They can often be boiled down to someone ending up where they are not supposed to be, or think they are supposed to be.

For example, the opening story, “The Devil Don’t Come with Horns,” was a wise choice for an opening story. A World Fantasy Award finalist, this tale follows a Black man who becomes a father and finds horror in being the “other” in his racist neighborhood. This suburban horror is punctuated by rhythmic dialogue and vicious bouts of violence from neighborhood terrors. Bacon is telling readers that, in this collection, horrors won’t just be found in space, or in fantastical worlds, but in familiar neighborhoods and backyards where one might have imagined one belonged.

Many of Bacon’s stories are dreamlike: Even when associated with real-world places like Zanzibar, they can be hard to place. I initially read the collection in chronological order, but quickly found that this was neither necessary nor preferred. Having read and reviewed Bacon’s work before, I enjoy her work best when I take a (big) step back from conventions like chronology and genre, and instead enjoy the ride. At times, this approach can feel like a more strenuous exercise, but at its best, it’s a very freeing and unique reading experience.

For instance, “Paperweight,” a recent BFSA nominee for Short Fiction, boasts one of my favorite tropes: a mysterious, ancient library filled with secret artifacts. But, rather than following an anthropologist or academic exploring its halls, we instead have J, a young man who schemes his way in to find the Bury Paperweight, an ancient gemstone. Like many other characters in these stories, J quickly discovers why some ancient powers are meant in fact to be left alone.

Bacon routinely upends genres in this way, or puts them to unusual uses. Several stories in the collection engage in climate-change-ravaged or otherwise dystopian worlds that are difficult to inhabit. “The Water Runner” and “Derive, Moderately” were among my favorite stories in these kinds of settings. “The Water Runner” depicts a barren country where a woman harvests water from recently deceased bodies, while in “Derive, Moderately” Bacon details a woman’s journey across space, and her emotional turmoil after experiencing a violent separation from the love of her life. It’s a terrifying adventure that offers unexpectedly poignant insights into motherhood, sacrifice, and survival.

While not named as one of the collection’s themes, Bacon’s stories tend to explore survival in social, physical, and spiritual senses. Many of her characters yearn for affection amidst their struggles, like Pendo in “Dimension Stone”—not to rebel against a more traditional society, but to find fleeting connections amidst confusing and seemingly transient experiences. Those interactions are often short-lived, giving way to the supernatural or other powerful, worldly forces. Elsewhere, “Naked Earth” explores survival in a unique way that sets it apart as one of my favorites in the collection. Set in a fictional world where citizens are pressured to declare their political and moral stances, the story sees the character of Naeema wrestling with the implications of neutrality and indecisiveness. I thought this had some of the strongest worldbuilding among Bacon’s stories, as each choice the protagonist makes directly impacts how the rest of society views her.

I began this review by citing the last lines of Addison’s poem introduction, because this book is not an easy one to describe or categorize. It is an exercise in ambiguity, which creates a unique reading experience. While Bacon’s collection may be rooted in named and unnamed places, each story is driven by the (in)human emotions that follow us across worlds.