Eugen Bacon's Blog, page 13
August 2, 2019
A perfect double book launch in Melbourne
Couldn’t ask for better. Book launch 1 August 2019 for Writing Speculative Fiction and Claiming T-Mo. Thank you to the wonderful writers, colleagues, friends and family who showed up. Thanks to my amazing readers and reviewers for receiving my books so generously!
Bacon’s Melbourne book launch
July 18, 2019
July 7, 2019
Last Word of the Week – with Dr Clare E Rhoden
Last Word of the Week – with Dr Clare E Rhoden
Find out what fictional character I’d be!
Eugen Bacon
May 28, 2019
May 7, 2019
The creation of a toxic utopia in David Coleman’s The Shaming
New article on Macmillan International blog.
The creation of a toxic utopia in David Coleman’s The Shaming
March 13, 2019
Kaaron Warren and the art of dark fiction
Macmillan International launches a new blog, featuring the debut article Kaaron Waaren and the art of dark fiction.
Tide of Stone
March 10, 2019
Review: Rosalie Parker’s Old Knowledge
The Old Knowledge
Glen Cavalliero’s introduction works well in its scholarly dissertation of Rosalie Parker’s The Old Knowledge, linking authorly style with the character of prose, and breaking down analysis to speech inflections and the treatment of perspectives. The primer offers an inner gaze at the writer without exposing the surprises and twists in the narration.
Parker offers a vivid sense of place and relies on unrelenting settings—the long rain, the shroud cloud, the tomb-cold of a day—to build spook into desertion, dilapidation or shabbiness and maintain suspense.
The writing is honest, no frills or flourish, and it is bold. The story ‘Spirit Solutions’ stands out for its uncanny mix of tenses that vacillate between past and present, deliberately enmeshed to generate the effect of a human’s inhabitation by an otherly being. This effect might unsettle the unclued reader who mistakes it for artless writing, but Parker has a way of crafty spinning that makes each story work.
From the mysteries of a holiday cottage, a haunting in the family, a woman’s revenge entombed inside a garden, a travel through time for a moment with a tot… to a picture’s curse, each story offers up a sense of the sinister that glues the assemblage.
‘The Old Knowledge’, after which the collection is named, hauls in its own astonishments and stays true to the dangler endings that leave the reader with a pervading curiosity of the textual archaeology entombed with undug answers.
While there is much narration and some stories offer no dialogue, the text is enticing and hooking, and one cannot help but wonder that the writer takes much glee in the resourcefulness of each wicked ending.
First published in Aurealis #116
