The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki ASIN : B09CNGLKVV Language : English File size : 1965 KB Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited Review by Mark Walker The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (from hereon in to be known as YBASF) is a hard book to review. Actually any anthology can be tricky as any collection like this is only as strong as the sum of its parts. An anthology of 4 or 5 stories from the same author is one thing, but YBASF has 29 shorts from almost as many authors! Do you rate such a book against its poorest story, or against its greatest? Who makes that judgement call? As we all know, art is subjective and what works for me, won’t work for you and vice-versa. With so many stories, I can’t guarantee anyone is going to love them all; there were certainly some I wasn’t sure about. But I did enjoy reading them. As a window into the hearts of diverse writers, it was an eye-opening smörgåsbord of histories and cultures I am not familiar with. On that level, the book is a resounding success and introduced me to aspects of culture and folklore that were completely new for me. Of course, that makes it sound like I didn’t like some of the stories, which couldn’t be further from the truth. As I suggested earlier, a few of them just didn’t resonate with me as much as others. With such a wide variety of tales that encompass the mystical and spiritual, that are horrific, moving, scary and chilling and which include demons, ghosts, vampires, aliens, robots, spirits and djinns across horror, sci-fi and drama genres the reader is bound to relate to some more than others. Read that list again (which is definitely NOT exhaustive) and you can see how there is clearly something for everyone – well, maybe not if you are here for romantic comedies, but then I suspect you wouldn’t be reading reviews on Ginger Nuts of Horror if that was the case. (DISCLAIMER – I have nothing against RomComs, they just ain’t hanging around in the pages of YBASF.) I won’t go into each story in turn, not least because there isn’t the space to do them all justice, but looking back over my notes, there were no tales that I thought of as “bad” per se. I did feel that one or two of them could have been developed a bit further, and a few ended a little abruptly. Sometimes, leaving the audience wanting more is a good thing, but sometimes it can leave the audience feeling cheated – for each story, which it is will depend on the reader. There were only a couple that left me scratching my head, but, again, it is not necessarily a bad thing if a story gets you thinking, lodged in your head for a day or two. Even where a story didn’t work for me, the ideas behind those stories were still fascinating and intriguing and many of them lingered long after they were finished. I debated whether or not to list the stories that I particularly enjoyed but decided against it; I didn’t want to imply that anything I didn’t mention was of poorer quality. However, I will say that I enjoyed reading every story. Each one was different; a different tone, a different style and a different theme, each one an unknown quantity that has the potential to take you anywhere, and they rarely went where I expected them to. As I said before, it gave me a glimpse into culture and folklore that I am not familiar with and has led me to other African literature that now sits on my Amazon wish list! It was a pleasure and an honour to read the work of so many writers, and this book deserves to be read by as many people as possible. YBASF is an eclectic mix of stories from a group of talented and varied writers that will transport you to a world at once familiar but, at the same time, wonderful and new. With so many tales there are going to be some that won’t land for you, but that is to be expected. Even those that weren’t quite my cup of tea, will definitely have an audience out there. The YBASF will intrigue and delight any lover of short fiction and I would recommend it. The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction |
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