318 pages.
Expected publication date: July 18, 2023 (Undertow Publications)
Dark Fantasy/African.
What a delight this collection of dark fantasy this is! I love short story collections where an author shows off their range, and Tobi Ogundiran does that wonderfully here.
Although most of these stories have been published before, I was lucky in that I had only read a couple—memorably, The Goatkeeper’s Harvest, which I encountered in The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki—one of my top 5 African books for The Continent in 2021 (link to pdf).
Apart from that story, about the most terrifying goats you’ll never meet (based, the author says, on a holiday experience on a farm with West African dwarf goats when he was seven), there are: haunted pirate treasure; a haunted gothic manor with a haunted painting (think Dorian Gray); a haunted yellow library with a truly creepy librarian who eats lizards; an interstellar villain who should properly be in the MCU; an abiku (a spirit child from Nigerian mythology) haunting her family; a sentient forest; a haunted mall with the worst funhouse I’ve ever read about; a lágbájá, which is a kind of Nigerian changeling; and, finally, even Baba Yaga, the bogeyman from Russian mythology, makes an appearance.
Although there’s one story that’s very clearly post-colonial—Here Sits His Ignominy—the entire collection is a kind of tongue-in-cheek reimagining of fairytale and fantasy literature, which are, as we know, notoriously Eurocentric. I especially love that the collection blends the sensibility of Western fairytales (because yes, we all grew up on those) with West African mythology and cosmology, making this collection a possible future for African fantasy, which is really exciting. It’s also wonderful how Ogundiran accesses his experiences and memories in his writing, which he elaborates on in the story notes and author note at the back of the book.
Very highly recommended. The writing is very strong, Ogundiran’s imagination and world-building are fantastic, and this anthology is very fun.
Thank you to Edelweiss and to Undertow Publications for access to this DRC!
You can support independent bookshops, and my writing, by buying it on Bookshop here.
Harare Review of Books 
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