protean depravity

Nuzo Onoh is a Nigerian-British horror and dark fantasy author, also known as The Queen of African Horror. She is the author of at least eight novels, and has received, as the first African and Black-British, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2022. I have gotten to know her work in the past year, and I definitely intend to explore it further, so I’m very excited that she accepted an interview for Protean Depravity!

There's a reason that out of body experiences such as body swaps or astral projections are a staple of speculative fiction – the possibility of experiencing life in a different body, literally walking in the shoes of someone else, is EXCITING, it is the antidote of looking at the same old boring face in the mirror every single morning. But it is only when the experience is not a swap anymore, and becomes one sided, say like a possession or a haunting, then we're entering horror, uncanny territory. And if the bodies merged belong to people of backgrounds antithetical in nature, let's say the richest and most powerful white man of the world, the president of the USA, and an orphaned boy in Nigeria, you have pure social comedy, and that's what Nigerian-British author Nuzo Onoh explores in her latest book The Fake Ghost .

On the verge of her cousin Keziah's marriage, Bata, a girl who lives in a small Nigerian town with her family, has a kind of episode during which she steps into another dimension and, dressed as an awesome warrior-bride, kicks the ass of an evil ghost bride, who apparently formerly was engaged to her cousin's groom. See, Bata has been different all her life, suffering from nightmares which keep the whole household awake - and make them resent her a little bit. Before she is subjected to an exorcism by the town's medicine man Dibia, she is snatched by a magnificient spirit who takes her to Ibaja La, the land of ghost brides, and informs her that she is a sort of chosen-one, and she has a paranormal mission she needs to fulfill as a Bride-Sentinel. Of course, for a ten year old girl coming from a family in which things are less than ideal, a household divided into itself, a house in which she always has been the odd one, to arrive in a sort of wonderland of young women in ...