In a toilet cubicle at the university I attended was one piece of graffiti which has stayed with me: ‘Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs’. Okojie’s collection of short stories seems a corollary to that: realistic prose is for people who can’t remember their dreams. These stories are vivid, sometimes lurid, constantly changing dreamscapes. When we dream, the weirdness simultaneously feels unrealistic and completely believable. Getting those dreams successfully onto paper is (usually) problematic.

The surreal panorama unveils itself in the very first story. ‘Algorithm’ would suggest something boringly nerdy but swerves quickly into left field. Like poetry, it takes a few reads to tie down any meaning. Even then, what it means to me might be completely different to another’s perception. In this collection the weird is sometimes wonderful, and sometimes just weird: ‘… the man gave her heart to a volcano for his mother to eat’. You decide. The un-decidability should be cherished … but it takes a little work on the part of the reader.

The title story uses the maturing marine nudibranch shedding its shell to evoke feminist agency. Several disembodied tongues appear more than once, tasting, licking, especially with the time-shifting priests in ‘Filamo’. Time shifts also feature in ‘Daishuku’. Okojie traverses the globe with her stories. There are odd product placements throughout – the mundane amidst the uncanny. Some of the stories are reliant on plot, some aren’t.

What is consistent with each story is the originality of her description, using familiar words in very unfamiliar ways. This is as far from clichéd writing as you could possibly get. Whether the image ‘works’ or not is not the point; this is creativity at its primal best. That needs to be celebrated.

Reviewed by Bob Moore