Becoming The Muse

Intruders Book Review

Intruders is a short story collection of speculative fiction written by South African singer-songwriter and novelist Mohale Mashigo. The book was first published in 2018 by Picador Africa as an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa.

The short story collection features 12 stories spread across three sections; The Good, The Bad and The Colourful… The author’s note describes the book as being written for:

"…for us, who never see ourselves in the stars but die in seas searching for them. You are everything."
Author's Note Intruders
-Mohale Mashigo 

The Good

Its no secret that I have a soft spot for what I like call my beautiful, dark and twisted Afrofantasy— i.e.  Speculative Afrocentric Fiction. Mohale’s opening remarks resonate with me in how we need a genre that identifies with authors living in Africa creating speculative fiction about Africa, for readers in Africa – The subtext being that authors in the diaspora write from a different lived experience and for a different audience – Mohale also goes to lengths to explain that though her body of work may be set in the future, it should not be classified as Afrofuturism –maybe we need a new name to classify it under.

Let us use our folktales if need be – use them to imagine us being fantastical in this Africa we occupy right now.

Intruders

The stories are fantastical, taking dark twists that end in dramatic cliffhangers that leave you with a gut wrenching desire to know what happens next but alas… That’s all there is, there isn’t anymore.

There is one story, which you will be delighted to discover that it continues spread across three parts that I could describe as pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic and feels like it would do well as novella or full feature book. (Dear Mohale, incase you reading this and wondering what project to work on next)

Intruders is a fantastical vignette of speculative fiction blending magical fantasy with scifi, history and folktales to give you tales of mermaids, werewolves, heart-eating zombies, God-playing geneticists, memory stealing vaults, femme fatale ghosts and monster hunters…

A general theme of the book is the stories being told from perspective of the outsiders and outcasts, the ones who don’t quite belong or conform: Intruders; synonyms: trespassers, interlopers, invaders, prowlers, infiltrators, encroachers, violators.

“A collection of stories about nobodies who discover that they matter.”

–Mohale Mashigo

The Bad

Like any good short story collection, each tale abruptly drops you just when you had really become invested and its on to another story, with new characters and new settings to conjure up… the shift can at times being jarring, one minute you are in a story with call-backs to the wayback past and next you are in a world where the sun is about to be snuffed out, and existence along with it.

Maybe because I was reading the book in a bus, the ride was bumpy and a chatty passenger made up their mind, I must be an eccentric creative and kept intruding to ask silly questions like if I was famous…

@beatonm5

Reading a book on a long bus ride Intruders by Mohale Mashigo booktok bookworm

♬ Look at the Sky – Porter Robinson

Point is, the stories were not easy reads they needed concentration, the writing is nuanced and packed in subtext with a rather non-linear storytelling that drops you in the middle of the action then fills in the blanks introducing the characters and  whats been going on till you get upto speed but you can feel a bit lost in some tales and just about when you get the full picture… the story ends!

Some tales are peppered in vernacular phrases and it would have been nice to have a glossary of some words and phrases used in the book, for us not familiar with the lingo.

The Ugly

Intruders takes the familiar and spins it into a fantastical journey that is a reflection of society and its struggles, particularly the plight of women and children in some viscerally poignant perpectives… like that of women who snap and kill their spouses or random strangers with heels or vengeful spirits;

…a Vera is a collection of energies emboldened by a particularly cruel death…..[…particularly the death of women at the hands of men had stopped being sad or shocking. The sadness, pain and fear of the women left behind in the violence calls on the dead women as protectors or avengers.]
-BnB in Bloem, Intruders

Some stories also explore the drug pandemic that snuffs out colour in the world, the way our present is shaped on the exploits of the ancestors who came before us and how forgetting the past does not change the truth and that sometimes the light can burn….

“Things that lurk in the shadows do not like the light. People get used to one tiny light and begin to seek out more of it in the world and in themselves – that’s how the light liberates us.”

Once Upon A Town – Intruders

Final Thoughts

A unique and memorable collection of familiar tales reimagined as speculative fiction that will leave you yearning for more.