“The third time your mother called you Agnes, she hit you in the face with a Bible.”

There are moments in Nigerian author Aguda’s story when breathing becomes a challenge, the lungs corralled into paralysis as she winds us repeatedly with a sentence, a concept, an image. Told in the second person (which somehow permits both displacement and great intimacy), the piece escalates as its young narrator, a woman whose mother believes she is possessed by the spirit of her own mother, commits increasingly wicked, cruel acts. African horror stories tend to occupy more nuanced territory than their often glib Western counterparts: tension is hewn not from hyperbolic gore, but by evoking our primordial fears of what lies just beyond the veil of reality. The violence, when it comes, avoids grandiose pyrotechnics, the understatement rendering it ever more chilling. A beautifully written, inimitable and extraordinary story.

First published online in Granta, October 2019 and available to read here