Blog Tour: CRIMSON IN QUIETUS by Eugen Bacon

 

We're happy to help Meerkat Press support the release of their latest title CRIMSON IN QUIETUS by Eugen Bacon by participating in their blog tour. 

For our portion of the tour, Eugen has decided to participate in our indie spotlight, sharing some insight into fear... fear of writing, fear of rejection, and overocming imposture syndrome.

Confessions of a literary magpie

I had a lot of fear writing this book. My fear was about rejection—how would the audience receive this book? I was nervous, why? Because it was the first time I was writing such a big work set in the Afrocentric Sauútiverse.  

 

True, I’d already written stories set in this universe, including award winners, as in The Nga’phandileh Whisperer: A Sauútiverse Novella that recently won the Foreword Indies Book of the Year, was a finalist in the same award for the Fantasy category and was a finalist in the British Fantasy and Aurealis Awards. It also made the preliminary ballot for the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards. 

But, as writers, we only feel as good as the last book. We tell ourselves: The publisher is expecting… The audience is expecting… Awards are expecting… And we are also expecting…

 

There was already so much expectation for this book, the development of which was supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund as part of the University of Tasmania’s three-month Hedberg Fellowship. I spent three whole months in Tassie researching the novel, whose fiction borrowed from the island’s natural beauty of rocky outcrops, stalactite and stalagmite caves, cascading waterfalls, rivulet trails and fiery auroras that now found themselves in an Afrocentric Sauútiverse novel.

 

In writing it, I connected with the characters, found order in their disorder. I worried if my new kind of speculative literary mystery where the investigator was not a detective, but a sound magic specialist held. The opening of the book was reassuring, as were the publisher’s comments: “This is such a wonderful book!”

 

The story opens with the afterlife, a dimension of the dead, where the souls of our ancestors lurk:

Prologue: Crossing to Eh’wauizo

 

The crossing to Eh’wauizo, the spirit realm, is in the backwaters of a black river. Put a pinch of shadow and blood salt in your pocket, or sew it in a hem. Slip a button, a tooth, a chicken bone, a crystal or a small, shiny thing under your tongue for Ze-ne to collect. The ear of a ghost orchid, or the twig of a dragon-no’s blood tree is also good. It will ward off omens.

 

Tie a blindfold with a spotless garment—ebony or crimson—and listen for light. You will see silver specters in nondescript shapes turning to wine colors. Don’t mind them. Tend away from echoes and negotiate towards ripples of gentler waters whose lick at your calf then your waist then your chest then your neck especially frightens you as you submerge. Keep treading underwater even as your lungs swell.

 

Resist an urge to scream. Don’t struggle or hold your breath, even as your arms and legs begin to feel laden with rocks. Relax your body, think of the potential. Your chest is tearing, everything inside burning, but it isn’t. Your head will feel light, lighter still as you recognize the approaching Ze-ne-nazala, dear Ze-ne—the demigoddess of death—who will float you to a place of no fear.

 

This is Eh’wauizo, the dimension of our ancestors.

 

Protagonists Muso’mi and Fin’Lei each reminds me of myself in their own different way. Muso’mi is gifted and sometimes wishes she wasn’t. She’s not consumed with vanity and doesn’t like confrontation. She doesn’t need a mirror to tell her what she looks like, because she’s studied many mirrors and decided she likes her jaw, she doesn’t like her jaw. She likes the shape and fullness of her lips, she doesn’t like the shape and fullness of her lips… It varies with moods, how she feels about herself.

 

Like Muso’mi, Fin’Lei is curious about the world, she’s exploratory. She’s had the best and the worst of worlds. She’s had Granmaé, someone to look up to, clear-eyed, honest-faced Granmaé whose entire being said trust me, because you can. On the other hand, Fin’Lei has never known familial love. Her parents are hardworking, doing the best they can as humans would in a world where robots and enhanced humans perform better. Such is the iron of life—Fin’Lei didn’t choose it.

 

It’s natural, then, that these two misfits, Muso’mi and Fin’Lei, find kindredhood in each other. But the universe is warped and has other ideas.

 

I wrote this novel as stories-within-stories. It’s a creative composition that’s both spontaneous and researched. My writing was discovery, lived experience and more. I layered the novel story by story, creating a longer piece of work using a discipline of short story writing already familiar. I paid attention to the short story and embedded vignettes and tales that could be continued, carefully placed within the novel, interlinked them and layered with characters, events, motifs and interplays—a sum of the parts.

 

In hindsight, I can say imposter’s syndrome be damned! The reviews are coming and they affirm that, in Crimson in Quietus, I did something right.

 

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Crimson in Quietus 

Release today!

Science Fiction | Horror | Afrofuturism

From the queen of genre-bending speculative fiction, comes the newest Sauútiverse offering, a mystery like no other, where the investigator is not a detective, but a sound scientist. 

In a world where sound is a tangible force, Muso’mi is a maadiregi—an expert in the art of consuming it. At the prestigious Mahadum, she researches the language of silence, seeking to master the gift her mother calls theft. But academic intrigue turns to deadly peril when her friend vanishes after unearthing a hidden truth. Pursuing clues through pools of quietude across worlds, Muso’mi stumbles upon a horrifying discovery: a pattern of carnage left in fields of harvested silence. Now, the hunter becomes the hunted, as her unique expertise draws her into the orbit of a serial killer who understands the power of sound all too well. 

Includes a glossary of Bantu, Afrocentric and made-up words from this cross-cultural tale written in gorgeous lyrical language packed with emotion. 

Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon

“Bacon has one of the most unflinchingly unique voices in modern fiction, be it in the speculative field or anywhere else. Crimson in Quietus is her most lyrical, ambitious work to date.” 

—Keith Rosson, author of Coffin Moon

“Eugen Bacon has crafted a unique and utterly fearless literary mosaic that gleefully defies genre traditions and rejects all conventional standards of classification. Unflinching and written with such powerful poetry and lyricism, Crimson in Quietus is raw, intense, and captivating. One of the most extraordinary, mesmerizing, and magnetic novels I've ever had the honor of reading.”

—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“Bacon’s prose is as rich as the worldbuilding, studded with neologisms derived from African language and legends (a helpful glossary provides both meanings and derivations).

—Publishers Weekly

 

 

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She is a Solstice, British Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus, Foreword Indies and BSFA Award winner. She’s also a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick Awards and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was announced on 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.