Title – A Country of Extra Ordinary Ghosts

Author – Onyeka Nwelue

Publication – August 2018.

Publisher – Blues and Hills

Book Review

A Country of Extra Ordinary Ghosts is one of the craziest books I’ve read featuring Nigerians, because of the debauchery that occurs throughout this story. It was the major theme. The Bad Side of Lust. I swear this should have been the title because the book really showcases how uncontrolled lust can be a detriment in our lives.

As much as I enjoyed this story, I have a lot of bones to pick with it. First and foremost, The jump from one world to another is quite alarming. We are in Sodom one minute and we are arriving in Lagos, Nigeria the next. But then again the pacing of the story is that of a train on track moving at full speed.

Sodom is really a land that deserves to face the wrath of God, the people of Sodom are wild and it’s sickening the stories shared within this book of the occurrences there. Some of the stories are loose, they don’t have a rhyme with the flow of the story, but the purpose of why it has been shared is clear, to paint a bigger picture of Sodom and it’s people, it just saddens me how the shared stories are cut abruptly, we don’t really know the consequences or the effect such actions that occurred created, so it left me with a feeling of incompleteness.

The narrator of the story is nameless, but we do know the sex of the narrator is that of a human male. I really would have loved to know his name, because it felt like his name was very important. This story travels from Sodom, a land long before today, I’m not sure if it’s B.C. or A.D. I also wish that was specified. To Lagos, Nigeria and finally to Rome.

Once the narrator lands in Lagos, he is disoriented but he knows basic words and stuff, he didn’t really know where he was but he knew words to clothe items and definition of some things, which is fine, the only problem I had with this amnesia is that he didn’t know what a phone was, but could remember Vin Diesel by name. Just nope.

The narrator becomes friends with a boy named Bolu, who lives in Ajegunle, so of course, in this kind of environ, we are blessed with a slew of pidgin English and wordings. A lot of crazy occurrences occur during the narrator’s friendship with Bolu, which ended terribly, and led the narrator into a much more terrible fate, where the narrator experienced and saw a lot of things that will make your blood boil with disgust and anger.

This book highlights sexual child abuse, rape, nonconsensual coupling etc. I swear so many examples of paedophilia—it’s utterly disgusting. I would say more but spoilers.

I had an issue with the insulting of a tribe, I truly don’t see the need for it at all, because there was nothing to back it up and only it only promoted Tribalism, so #DoBetter. There are many errors in this book, it wasn’t properly edited, some repetition in the same paragraphs and the ending of this tale is too abrupt, didn’t fancy it at all. I feel this book still has a lot of work to do because the blurb says a patient at Yaba Left is fond of telling people stories, and this is one of the stories, if you do not read the blurb, you’ll never know this, because the patient or the hospital is never mentioned in the book, it just starts with the story the narrator is saying. I was complaining about this when someone took me to a page at the start of the book, that says Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria. Alone nothing else on the page, I must have seen it and thought it was a dedication. It’s like the blurb was just made up after the story had been completed and so to justify it, that page was added to the book.

This book is different, it will grip you once you start reading it, you’ll laugh and your eyes will pop open after you read some parts, but all in all it’s a good book, which ends up calling out a group that covers up a lot of shit, their members do all over the world. It’s quite entertaining because well when isn’t debauchery interest piquing?