Sadly I was confused with these short stories and I had to DNF. It was so hard to get into and felt like it was all over the place. Or maybe I was not in the right space to read the book.

3.5 Stars

This is a collection of short stories. Some were incredibly insightful, emotional, and powerful. Others not so much.

The overall running themes included women's struggles with love, life, and motherhood. Oh and some Tender Is The Flesh worthy thriller stories. Except with water.

I feel like this was an overall sophisticated book that can be discussed and/or debated for hours.

This superb collection of stories shows the range, skill and remarkable literary mind of Eugen Bacon. What a journey it took me on, and what a wonderful introduction to her writing. Bacon has won many honours, and Danged Black Thing makes it easy to see why.

One story here is set in a future London full of holograms and bad dates. Another comes from a dry future where water for general use is extracted from the dead. In Kampala, a man persuades his wife to get a chip implanted so he can have access to unlimited data. Angerboda is the goddess whose adopted sons seem to turn into dictators.

There are two stories specifically about immigrant life: in The Failing Name, the contrast between the fantasy of life overseas and reality is shown when a girl is sent away to live with her rather cruel aunt; and Rain Doesn’t Fall on One Roof is about a woman who left home for university on another continent, and who now struggles with the financial burdens and loneliness of being a student and mother without her social support system.

The Window’s Rooster is a short fable, similar to what you would hear around a fire at night in many parts of Africa. One of my favourite stories is the fantastic one written with E. Don Harpe—whose bio says he’s descended from America’s first serial killers!—about a certain dictator, The Man, whose country was “stolen” (in his words) by Milton Obote, and whose memory has now faded to irrelevance. A Taste of Unguja is a surreal tale of vengeance, African-style. Still She Visits is a tender and heart-breaking ghost story about sisters, separation, and AIDS. The title story, also written with Harpe, is a very cool and sublimely slick story about possessed machines.

Bacon takes readers to many dreamy and delightfully weird times and places with this collection. There is much that feels unusual even for this genre. In addition, most of these stories are about Africans or Africa, making Danged Black Thing distinctly Africanfuturist (possibly with a touch of Africanjujuism). This elevates Bacon to one of my particular favourites; so few writers are writing in this area, and even fewer with such skill.

Read this particularly if you like speculative fiction, if you enjoy unusual short stories, or perhaps want to be introduced to the form by a highly proficient and very imaginative writer. Highly recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Apex Book Company for access!

This collection of short stories was unlike anything I have ever read before. The world building, the various themes., and the character development will really have the mind going. I look forward to reading more.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Apex Book Company for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Wow, Eugene Bacon can <I>write</I>. And she does so with a one-of-a-kind style that I think would be instantly recognizable among a collection of different authors' works. While I think some of the stories in this particular collection were beyond me, I thoroughly enjoyed the language of each of them and the atmosphere they conjured up (and especially the way Eugene Bacon doesn't ever spell anything out for you—it's up to you to take away your own interpretation).

In <I>Danged Black Thing</I> are seventeen short stories, each set in different time periods and sometimes even different genres. Sometimes the protagonist is borrowed from Greek myth, sometimes from actual history, and sometimes from the future. The stories seem to be linked only by the gorgeous prose, which can be dense and opaque, almost hard to understand. Reading this collection worked best for me in small amounts; it became fairly exhausting and difficult trying to "binge" them, so to say. It's definitely not your average "winding-down" reading. There's a lot of thought involved.

Some standouts were "The Water Runner," "When the Water Stops," "Still She Visits," and "De Turtle O Hades," purely subjective, because a few of the references went over my head (for example, the first story has something to do with Lovecraft—I <I>know</I> it does, but that's all I can recognize) and because it's difficult for me to judge the craft of a style so unique that it bends the meaning and usage of words. It makes for an interesting, almost viscous experience, but one that's hard to judge.

I found the characters in these stories fascinating as well, because they were all so flawed (and sometimes outright horrible). Within these works, we have complex ideas like a man embracing the monster inside, a woman unable to confront her infatuation with white Englishmen (and her contempt for her own people), and an immigrant visited by the ghost of her sister and haunted by the abuse that only she escaped.

I can honestly say I've never encountered a writer quite like this one, and although I don't think I would pick up a novel-length work from her, I'll definitely keep an eye out for more of her short stories. A huge thank you to NetGalley and Apex Book Company for letting me read a copy of this book!