There’s speculative fiction. There’s weird fiction. And then there’s the fiction of Irenosen Okojie, where the term “weird” is taken not just to another level, but another dimension. The fifteen stories in “Nudibranch” are mostly (but not always) set in recognisable places: the streets of London and Berlin, a monastery (somewhere in England?), an international airport. Yet, what happens in them is almost so bizarre as to be incomprehensible. One story, for instance, features time-travelling monks carrying out bloody acts under the watchful eye of a team of saints. Another involves a woman who turns into liquorice.

These flights of fancy are certainly intriguing. However, getting through this collection was, admittedly, particularly difficult. Okojie not only presents the reader with surreal scenarios, but conveys them in a dense, metaphor-laden language which straddles the worlds of prose and poetry and makes the strangeness stranger. Whether one enjoys this depends, I suspect, not just on one’s taste but also on one’s mood at a given point in time. I must admit that there were times when I just couldn’t get into the stories. And there are some of the pieces which I just didn’t understand despite my best efforts. Recommended if you like your fiction different and challenging. ( )

There’s speculative fiction. There’s weird fiction. And then there’s the fiction of Irenosen Okojie, where the term “weird” is taken not just to another level, but another dimension. The fifteen stories in “Nudibranch” are mostly (but not always) set in recognisable places: the streets of London and Berlin, a monastery (somewhere in England?), an international airport. Yet, what happens in them is almost so bizarre as to be incomprehensible. One story, for instance, features time-travelling monks carrying out bloody acts under the watchful eye of a team of saints. Another involves a woman who turns into liquorice.

These flights of fancy are certainly intriguing. However, getting through this collection was, admittedly, particularly difficult. Okojie not only presents the reader with surreal scenarios, but conveys them in a dense, metaphor-laden language which straddles the worlds of prose and poetry and makes the strangeness stranger. Whether one enjoys this depends, I suspect, not just on one’s taste but also on one’s mood at a given point in time. I must admit that there were times when I just couldn’t get into the stories. And there are some of the pieces which I just didn’t understand despite my best efforts. Recommended if you like your fiction different and challenging. ( )

This is an interesting collection of short stories, often in the realms of magic realism or symbolism. Throughout the collection, the motif of transformation dominates: a woman wakes up to find she has turned into a piece of liquorice; a group of friends gather for an evening of paintball only for it to turn into an horrific gore-fest; a woman earns her living by impersonating Grace Jones; people literally shed their outer skin and become something other...

Okojie is clearly a wonderful writer, her turn of phrase is deft and exact, and there are glimpses of some wonderful poetic prose; in one story a man falls for a trans woman, describing her as 'the curve of a kaleidoscope landed on a moon'. Wonderful. These are involving and elusive stories, where the idea of mutating becomes a metaphor for something wider in each case. And the stories are wide-reaching in their geographical setting, veering from London to Berlin to Africa and the US.

The reader is constantly left with unanswered questions, having to work out just what might be going on, typified by the final story where the main character had suffered a previous brain trauma and wonders if he might be undergoing another. Challenging and just slightly out of reach of your fingertips, this is a fascinating collection, with some stories being stronger and more engaging than the others. For all that, much as I enjoyed it, it just felt a little same-y, and after the first 'story' - a lyrical invocation that sets the tone for what is to come - it never quite hits those heights again. Definitely recommended, a strong 3.5 stars. ( )