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    The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories
    The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories
    The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories
    Ebook277 pages5 hours

    The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

    By Eugen Bacon

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Eugen Bacon's work is deemed cheeky with a fierce intelligence in text that's resplendent, delicious, dark and evocative. NPR called her novel Claiming T-Mo a confounding mysterious tour de force'. The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories imbues the same lushness in a writerly language that is Bacon's own. This peculiar hybrid of the untraditional, the extraordinary within, without and along the borders of normalcy will hypnotise and absorb the reader with tales that refuse to be labelled. The stories in this collection are dirges that cross genres in astounding ways. Over 20 provocative tales, with seven original to this collection, by an award-winning African Australian author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateDec 1, 2020
    ISBN9781946154323
    The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories
    Author

    Eugen Bacon

    Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels, prose poetry and collections. She’s a British Fantasy Award winner, a Foreword Book of the Year silver award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the British Science Fiction Association, Aurealis, Ditmar and Australian Shadow Awards. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing by Transit Lounge Publishing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Eugen lives in Melbourne, Australia. Visit her website at eugenbacon.com

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    Reviews for The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

    3.5/5

    21 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Strange, beautiful, poetical, enticing stories. The stories are not very easy to read.Part of the problem is, that I am not a native speaker of English. Normally that does not matter very much. But now I did not understand the first story, partly due to the fact that I do not know anything about cars and that I am not a good map reader. I was also mistaken about the sex of the 'you' (quite interesting by the way, this happened more often). When I read the story a second time, it was still a strange story, but at least I understood what I was reading.The second story (no, I am not going to tell you about all those stories) was sweet. This sentence stands in my mind: 'Does grief take a holiday?' Beautiful.The writer lives in Australia, I live in Europe. The entire setting of the stories is strange to me.Some stories made less impression, some of them made me sad. I loved the story ‘Mahuika’, I had to laugh aloud. But most of the time the stories made me wonder. Wonder about the story, wonder about the way the story was written.Eugen Bacon is just a very good writer.
    • 3/5
      I'm not entirely sure how to rate this collection of short stories, because for me some of the stories worked exceedingly well and I could have read a whole novel based on them, but others left me utterly confused and feeling like I was missing the point entirely. These stories each certainly take some unexpected turns, but it felt like some of them were written so sparingly and were so short that I couldn't quite grasp what was even happening before the story was over. I found myself re-reading some of the especially short ones and feeling like I was missing something that should have been obvious (i.e. what exactly the story was). Other stories were wonderful, so rich and with fascinating characters that I thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to be able to live with awhile longer. As I said, there are several stories in this collection that I quite loved and would have enjoyed a full novel about. It's a mixed bag of a collection, at least for my taste, but I think the stories that really work make the read well worth it.
    • 4/5
      Woop Woop is an Australian phrase for a destination outside your area.  The Road to Woop Woop is a collection of short stories by Australian writers that fall somewhere into the speculative fiction category.  Each story led me on a journey; some of the journeys were to places very familiar and some were to places unknown.  Like any collection of short stories, there were some stories that I liked better than others and characters that I wanted to stay with longer.  Most of these stories had me thinking deeply about humanity and the state of the world.  Some of my favorite stories are: A Maji Maji Chronicle, A Case of Seeing, Five-Second Button, Being Marcus and Dying.  A Maji Maji Chronicle follows a magician father and son as they travel back in time to a native village in 1905 as they are being invaded by white men.  The father gives the village leader a magical gift that alters the timeline.  This story had me thinking about the effects of a single moment in history as well as greed and the balance of power.  A Case of Seeing is a great science-fiction mystery that had me wanting more as a Detective with a supernatural gift is called to the crime scene for the death of a Nobel Prize candidate.  Five-Second Button delves into a fantasy that we have probably all wanted to discover at some point, a chance to see your future.  What the character chooses to do with her life knowing her future is really interesting.  Being Marcus is a take on Brutus' betrayal of Caesar where Brutus was given a sentence of eternal life.   It was really interesting to see this character in the present day and the decisions he made.  Dying is a Groundhog's Day-esque humorous take on life, fate and who is ultimately pulling the strings.This book was received for free in return for an honest review. 
    • 1/5
      I try in my reviews to be as fair as possible and to avoid bad reviews but this odd collection of bits of text, despite being billed as speculative fiction failed to give me a chance to praise a single aspect. I almost didn't finish the first piece and now I wish I had trusted my gut: there were a few pieces that were better and not one that was worse than the opener but ... Having thought about this review for a couple of days I have to be honest and say that all of the pieces feel like tyro pieces, exercises in trying to find a voice. Sorry but I could not commend this book to anydody
    • 5/5
      Eugen Bacon's collection is pretty much everything that I wish a collection of stories could and be. That is to say the stories are so different from each other. The Road to Woop Woop reads like an anthology. Each story requires breathing room and it is not the kind of collection you can blast through. Each story stands on its own and you can read through each one and then Bacon begs you, by the time you are a page or so into the next story and just stop to reflect on what you had just previously read through. It is a very different collection of stories and reminds me of Jeff Vandermeer's The Third Bear and even Secret Life in the way that the stories are very much their own singular things. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this vibrant and challenging collection. Meerkat press to provided the PDF version with artwork as well. So the final book, in print, is just going to look stunning.
    • 4/5
      These short pieces are colorful, inventive, confusing. Each sentence is readable, lush, but disconnected. There are numerous short-cuts between times, places, characters. I don't know how to read these stories, don't know whether they are full of promise or just fragments patched together. And they do not inspire me to take the time to reread, rethink, and find out what they are.
    • 4/5
      A wonderfully unusual and unique collection of stories. It's difficult to pigeonhole them, but perhaps they are best described as literary speculative fiction. This is not a book to sit down and read in one go. Each story is a form of challenge. A bite of an unfamiliar reality that has hooks in our own. The words are slippery, painting unfamiliar scenes, pieces of somewhere disorientating. They are not easy reading, and require absorption one at a time.
    • 5/5
      In Australia, the slang expression ‘woop woop’ can be used to describe ‘the middle of nowhere’. However, each of these twenty-four distinctive stories took me on a journey which always ended up somewhere, even if that final destination wasn’t quite where I’d imagined it would be and, in a nutshell, that captures for me much of the magic of Eugen Bacon’s awesome storytelling. As always, I found that her writing defies being shoe-horned into any narrow genre, instead it encompasses elements of many, weaving them together in a range of speculative ways to create nuanced yet vivid word-pictures, images which are so much more than the sum of their constituent parts. Within this collection you’ll find shape-shifting characters, a re-imagining of ancestral stories from different cultures, time-travel, science fiction, astrology, vampiric characters, the supernatural, explorations of identity, race and gender – in fact I’m left wondering whether there’s any genre she hasn’t managed to speculatively incorporate into her lyrical story-telling. Some of these stories are chilling, some disturbing, some poignant, some erotic, some sensuous, some humorous, with many incorporating a number of these elements. However, common to each story is the sense of passion which percolates through them, like the words through a stick of seaside rock. This is sometimes quietly gentle, sometimes explosive in its intensity, but is always conveyed using eloquent, poetic language which is a joy to read. In her reflections on love, loss and grief I find that there is an empathetic universality to her writing, something which transcends race, gender, ancestry, identity, yet without in any way diminishing the distinctive importance of each. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel engrossed in these stories and think that the reason for this is because the richness of Eugen Bacon’s prose reflects an impression that she writes from the heart, thus creating a feeling of intimacy which immediately draws her readers into the various worlds she has created for her charismatic characters. I love her epigraph – For the stories we yearn to tell, the diversity of our voices. I am many, betwixt, a sum of cultures – as I feel that this captures so succinctly something which is central to the power of her evocative writing. Although some of the stories in this wonderful collection are very short, none should be read quickly. The captivating quality of the writing, where not one word feels superfluous, made me want to take time, allow myself to become lost in the magic of each story. Then, at the end of each one, I found that I needed to stop and reflect on the journey which had transported me to a different place. So, at a very early stage in my reading, I made the decision to read just two or three each evening, as a ‘before bedtime treat’! I’d find it impossible to choose a favourite because each of the stories resonated in a unique way and, to do justice to them, I’d need to write twenty-four mini-reviews! Instead, what I will do is urge you to discover for yourself how special they are. I can’t finish this review without mentioning Tricia Reeks’ striking and evocative cover design – the promise of a magical journey starts here!With my thanks to Meerkat Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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    The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories - Eugen Bacon

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