We're happy to help Meerkat Press support the release of their latest title, NOVIC, by participating in their blog tour.
Today we are joined by Eugen
Bacon, who is not only celebrating the release of her own book, but has been generous enough to recommend one of her favorites to us!
Eugen is an African Australian author. She’s a Solstice, British Fantasy and
Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award
finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick Award, Ignyte and the Nommo
Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and
was also announced in the honor list for "doing exciting work in gender
and speculative fiction." Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award
Honor List as a "sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work." Visit her
at eugenbacon.com.
Writers
Recommend: Songs of Solomon by Toni Morrison, with Eugen Bacon
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
I
am a voracious reader and an immersive writer. I have always been curious about
the world. I grew up reading African ‘how’ and ‘why’ stories: Why the crocodile
lives in the water. How the zebra got her stripes. Why the hyena has two short
legs… In school, we studied Margaret Ogola, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Camara Laye,
Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe in literature.
Then I discovered Toni
Morrison, the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize (1993) in
literature. The first book I read was her Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved,
and I was enchanted with the beauty of her language, the longing in her
characters. It was longing that touched me inside. I bought and read Tar
Baby, Jazz, Sula, Song of Solomon… and I knew that I wanted
to write like that.
Morrison’s revolutionary
and most defining literary act was writing for black readers about black
people. She taught me to see myself in the text. This was the ilk of writer I
wanted to become—one completely at home with her stories. I wanted to ‘write
different’, and she showed me this ‘writing different’ through Tar baby (1981), Sula
(1998), Jazz (1993), Song of Solomon (1998) … through her body of
works that made Morrison one of the most celebrated authors of the 21st
century.
Voice is integral to a writer’s identity. Voice gives
clue to where we come from, the social groupings that have influenced us and
allowed a glimpse of our experiences, beliefs, desires. Our perspectives on the
world. This means we enter the writing with an inherent positioning that
informs our style. In shaping my own voice quite early on, I was drawn to
Morrison. She seduced me with her riveting dialogue, her depth of
characterisation, the ambition, adventure and variability of her writing that
discouraged me from bad writing.
To illustrate blunt and masterful prose that draws a
reader’s curiosity, consider chapter 4 of Song of
Solomon where Morrison describes protagonist Milkman’s perception of his
lover Hagar:
‘She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the
throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms
and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because
it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?’
Morrison in this illustration adopts a pragmatic
approach to compare Hagar with a third beer—it is optional, insignificant—to
deformalise with levity a complex relationship. The blunt yet masterful
appraisal uses a simple but familiar object (beer) to ensure the reader is
conversant with where exactly Hagar stands with Milkman, even though Hagar
herself might not know it. In sync with her other novels, Song of Solomon holds black cultural focus. The
essential aspect of Morrison’s cast is their being black, their battles with or
acceptances of being black.
Morrison makes her writing personal, casts her
characters—their battles with or acceptances of being black—in an accessible
way. There is strength and spirit in her writing. I draw a chair next to me for
Morrison, certify my enthralment in her radicalism, discover from this mentor a
model to benchmark myself against.
Always.
If you surrendered to the
air, you could ride it.
― Toni Morrison, Song of
Solomon
~
Morrison, T1998, Song
of Solomon, Vintage, London.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOVIC
Release Date: September 16, 2025
Sci Fi | Dark Fantasy
Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon
SUMMARY:
Discover
the haunting origins of an immortal soul in Novic, a mesmerizing novelette by
Eugen Bacon that serves as the "story-before-the-story" of the
enigmatic Sayneth priest introduced in her acclaimed debut novel, Claiming
T-Mo.
In
Claiming T-Mo, Novic emerges as a figure of profound mystery—an immortal with
eyes as ancient as Jacob and a visage that whispers of death itself. Novic's
defiance of a matriarchal society’s conventions sets in motion a
Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation of his son T-Mo that shapes his destiny along
with the three women who love him.
But
who is Novic? Where did he come from, and what forces forged his immortal path?
This prequel novelette delves into Novic’s past—his trials, his transgressions,
and the timeless burden of his existence.
As lyrical as it is dark. Novic is a
must-read for fans of Claiming T-Mo and newcomers alike.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXCERPT
from NOVIC
The slow trek of a snow camel took
him there. He never looked where he was going. He just went. The course through
the mountains was a brace—all tangled. Everything was savage about it: humping
ground personified to viciousness, roaring wind unwilling to give any answers.
Things crawled at him from the edge of his eye, dissolved when he looked
closer. He was a wreck. He felt a wreck. Further still, the horizon ran out of
time. The beast he rode on let out a gushy fart as Novic slid off the
saddleback. He slapped its rump as the handler said he should, and the camel
chewed cud and batted long lashes at him before it turned.
He trusted it would make its own way
back down to the cameleer farm he loaned it from. He’d bobbed in weirdness,
gently moving his body back, forth, lumbering side to side between its two
humps, and the only bother he felt was not from the stiffness of its woolly fur
beneath the skinny saddle but rather from the musky odor of it. There was also
the sour pungency of the camel’s breath, emphasized at intervals with rancid
burps. In essence, it was darn good riddance to let the beast go—he was done
holding his breath.
The Temple of Kripps in the Land of
Praeyer at a place below zero was off a cut stone path that led up, up to the
sky. A sense of doom hovered about it and he didn’t think it was anything to do
with the close of daylight. Novic strode on the cobblestones until he reached
the imposition of a two-meter door. He hunted for a bell, and nothing remotely
resembled one within his spectrum of visibility.
In the non-appearance of a doorbell,
he lifted the giant steel knocker that seemed there for a reason, and rapped
the tall, thick wood engraved with death masks.
Whose faces? He couldn’t tell.
A woman opened the grand entrance
and stood framed under its arc.
“Hi, I’m Brad,” she said.
He presumed she was the priestess
the cameleer had talked about. “Brad,” he said. “As in Bradelia? Bradossa?”
“Just Brad, thank you.”
She looked at him long and hard with
the deep, searching eyes of a door-to-door salesperson convincing one to trust
them, and succeeding. She wore an even, handsome face—he could almost call it a
welcoming square.
She moved aside to let him into the
temple.
“Don’t get many of you out here
banging at these gates,” she said.
He followed her into dim light, and
her flat wooden shoes made a god-awful racket on the stone floor. He’d expected
a robed sage, but here she was dressed in hot pants and a tank top. He noticed
how her body folded into itself, contours and ravines of skin after skin. Her
ash-speckled head was braided in two long-tailed cornrows, and a pearl drop
dangled down her nostril instead of her earlobe.
She halted, tinkered with a lantern
as he waited. She turned, and led him by lamplight along the limestone tiles of
a long, thin corridor three people wide. Hand-painted portraits of deities—the
halos?—lined the burnt brick walls. Brad halted without warning and he stopped
himself falling into her.
She fumbled with keys on a solid
door and pushed into a monk’s cell with feeble air.
“I guess this will do,” she said.
She threw open a baby window framed
in ebony wood and he welcomed the white moonshine that amplified the lamp’s
glow. He cast an eye about the room, swept his glance across the solemn bed and
its stingy bedding. He observed the shedding sheets tongued in a headfold
inside a course blanket that could well have been camel hair. A sole prayer
stool stood, somewhat lost, in the room. More faces of gods or dead people
carved out from the unpolished walls, and he was startled to see a long, thin
death mask with an uncanny resemblance to his face.
The bathroom at the end of the
corridor was a shared one, partitioned into toilet cubicles and an open area
that hosted thirteen sinks and seven shower stalls. Brad left him to it, and he
stepped off his clothes, set off the hot water tap. He didn’t notice the
absence of steam until he stepped under the shower and let out a shriek as icy
water lashed at his back.
~~~
He found her in a modest kitchen,
again, all stone. There was a hot pan on the stove.
“Why did you come here?” she asked
him.
He didn’t stall by pretending she
meant “here” as in the kitchen. He wondered how much to tell her. His power
over others. The potency of his Sayneth inheritance. His immortality.
Her eyes lit when he told her his
truth.
“Tell me more over food,” she said,
and whipped out fresh rye bread, warm from the oven. She put him at a granite
table with timber legs and six matching chairs that expected company. She sat
across and cut him a thick slice of the mouthwatering loaf, lathered it with
“forage chutney,” as she called it. “Potluck,” she said. “I never know what
I’ll find in it. Once I got silver ants in the jar. They were so delicious.”
She glanced at him. “Ever eaten ants raw?”
He smiled a response.
She poured him a drink from a gourd.
“Root beer,” she said.
He took the slice and sank his teeth
into it. The first chew was nutty and wild, full of the freshest herbs. He
sipped the frothless beer and flames reached his throat. His eyes widened. He
looked at the plate, then at the stein. His fingers seared, his throat raged.
His hands, legs, his whole body felt paralyzed—he couldn’t move.
Something clattered at or bounced
off the table and crashed to the floor.
“Why?” he thought or spoke as he
fell.
Brad was on top of him very quickly,
or in slow motion—he couldn’t tell.
Her touch was intimate, opening the
top of his shirt so he could breathe.
“Why?” his eyes said, a lone tear
gliding down the side of his face. He felt the froth filling his mouth.
“I never let an opportunity go
missing.”
She stroked his hair as the burning,
burning, ate away his gut and he coughed out his stomach in meat, blood and
bile, heave after heave, gasping for air,
as his innards
curdled and he
collapsed
out of his
mouth.
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