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.”

At work, Yosoye is spurned by her all-designer colleagues. Turned into an “errand girl”, she resolves to establish a role writing the company newsletter, but “Who would give a full-time job plus maternity leave to a 22-year-old with no work experience? Who did she think she was? Buchi Emecheta?”

This reference to the pioneering late Nigerian writer is, I am inclined to think, Aguda admitting influence. The novel’s central metaphor of water, and the tense push and pull between survival and surrender around which it is built, could be borrowed from Emecheta who, in her own words, remarkably kept her “head above water” (the title of her 1986 memoir) as she juggled single parenthood and a writing career in 1960s England. Another literary ancestor whose legacy hovers more ominously over the tale is the matriarch of the maternal uncanny, Toni Morrison, who gets a slanted nod by dint of a perfidious, well-heeled artist named Beloved (“What kind of name is that, even?”). Beloved takes Yosoye under her wing and gradually coaxes her toward the abyss, insinuating that the “suicide women” have made “powerful choices … Choosing to die. How. When. Isn’t that the ultimate proof that your body belongs to you?”

A virtuoso of dread and suspense, Aguda splices eco-horror, cosmic distress and ideas of the monstrous feminine into a singularly nail-biting experience. Yosoye feels haunted by the call of water, and daunted by the vast, sandy spaces around her workplace. When the dead women turn up – first in her dreams, in beckoning visions of sisterhood, and then on the shores of Omi City – she must work out what they represent, and are asking of her. Proffering more questions than answers, the novel luxuriates in a state of deliberate spooky indeterminacy. What makes a watery grave alluring to these women? Are these suicides acts of protest or a bid at transcendence? “What if it’s infectious like SARS or Ebola, but it’s only affecting us because we’re sharing our immune system with the babies?” Are the babies “evil water spirits, taking their mothers along as they plunged back to water, afraid to become human with bodies that didn’t flow”?

One of Yosoye’s colleagues invokes ancestors taken to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade: “Know what they did? They seized control of the ship, drowned their captors, then walked back into the water together.” There’s a history “closer to home” of “the Aramoko ipaye who came together and resisted becoming slaves to the Ibadan warriors by falling on their swords”. Are these “suicide mothers” transacting some form of freedom?

One Leg on Earth is a richly patterned work of tangled mysteries, whose perfectly wound knots begin, alas, to loosen, as Aguda nudges it toward a parable of resistance against private development. She shrewdly unpicks capitalist conceptions of power, privilege and ownership, and draws some intriguing parallels between childbirth and the birth of a city. But the tale is resolutely more gratifying as a phantasmagoric allegory of the uniquely transformative process of a woman transitioning into motherhood. As well as the body horror of maternity, summoned through serial visions of grotesquely distended stomachs, the novel forcefully explores the competing meanings that define and confine motherhood; and the hair-raising in-betweenness of expecting mothers, poised between life and death.