Dare Segun Falowo Caged Ocean Dub

It’s easy to forget how wide humans, and their stories, can range.  Genre fiction can extend this range, but seems to follow the same well-trod trails with characters alone giving only a slight hint of the imaginative potential.  With Caged Ocean Dub, Nigerian writer Dare Segun Falowo shines a light into the darkness to reveal vast swathes of untrod narrative territory.  Embracing folklore, realism, surrealism, science fiction and even poetry, Falowo’s fearless stories are electrifying, terrifying and a joyous reading experience. 

The book is divided into three distinct portions; Hungers, Hauntings and Heralds.  The story “Eating Kaolin,” from Hungers, gives an excellent idea of how Falowo works.  We start with Mary Ogene, pregnant and ravenously hungry, on the run for food and from “the white-skinned people,” her husband mostly absent.  As the danger closes in, her understanding of the power of the land changes the chase.  Mary’s experience slides into a world we no longer understand, but Falowo draws us in relentlessly using the tropes of horror, surrealism, and prose poetry to rewrite the readers’ world.  It’s storytelling and narrative art that is effortlessly powerful. 

Readers can expect a lot of variety in Caged Ocean Dub.  The short story “Oases” offers stark realism dialed up to hallucinatory revelation while the novella “October in Fran Riro” unspools in a second person narrative to tell a first-class horror story.  Highlighting the prose poetry that one finds in every piece are short works of flash fiction.  “What Not to Do When Spelunking in Anambra” offers the reading equivalent of a horrific LSD trip following on a viewing of Ancient Aliens.  This piece also gives a hint of what Falowo can do when reaching for the science-fiction toolkit.  The works in the “Heralds” are remarkable reminders of the flexibility to be found within the science fiction genre.  “Biscuits and Milk” and “Convergence in Chorus Architecture” manage to make really weird ideas unfold in the infinite plains of readers’ minds.  It all seems to be perfectly reasonable unreason. 

Caged Ocean Dub – the Tartarus Press limited hardcover edition, and the forthcoming paperback – offer an essential sample of the future of futuristic and supernatural fiction.  The hardcover edition is especially beautiful, as is the writing you’ll find there.  As for what you find there – it’s human, a language spoken everywhere, universally understood, individually experienced.

I put on my ignorance cap and tried hard to listen to Dare Segun Falowo.  What he wrote is original and compelling, so I reasoned what he said would be as well.  I was not disappointed, and you can hear him speak by following this link, or listen below.