One Leg on Earth by ’Pemi Aguda review – a powerfully eerie portrait of Lagos

A young pregnant woman is assailed by dark visions of sisterhood in a novel splicing eco-horror, cosmic distress and ideas of the monstrous feminine

Realism, contrary to appearances, isn’t a form closed off to horror. The stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection, Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 US National Book award, rivetingly bore out this fact. Neither strictly realistic nor wholly supernatural, they seized on ordinary events pulsing with sinister possibility: a mother distraught at her inability to produce milk for her newborn wonders whether her unresolved feelings over her husband’s infidelity might have poisoned her body; a young woman prone to violence fears she is inhabited by the spirit of a wicked ancestor; a driver who runs over a pedestrian can’t shake off the feeling that her own daughter will be next to die. One Leg on Earth, as the title suggests, is similarly a liminal creature, although it flirts more openly and ingeniously with darkness. It follows a young woman, Yosoye Bakare, newly arrived in Lagos to intern at an architecture firm involved with building Omi City, a state-of-the-art enclave on land reclaimed from the sea.

Away from home, Yosoye is hungry for adventure. Out on a stroll one night, she slips into a cruddy bar, allows a man to buy her a drink, and goes to a cheap motel where they have ravenous sex without protection. Across the city, pregnant women are inexplicably throwing themselves into open water. But when Yosoye learns she is expecting, she decides to keep the baby. “It was hard to explain to someone who hadn’t spent their whole life trying to belong, to be inside – the joke, the anecdote – that the promise of another being that would be just theirs, that would, yes, belong to them, was like cold water on the tongue after hours of trekking under the Lagos sun.”