Black gay American friends explore Ghana’s queer underground while a killer commits a grisly string of murders in this thrilling read
“Indeed, what makes No One Dies Yet a thrilling read is its refusal to fit into a prescribed mould. This is a book that brims with possibilities, contradictions, jokes, puzzles, detours, ambiguities, secrets and metafictional tricks and twists. It is also a book built on other books, and it thrives on irony and moments of sly pastiche. Some of the descriptions of battery could be taken from the pages of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (Kobby’s “awakening book”, which he rereads until its violence “becomes familiar”). There are references to John Grisham, Dean Koontz and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer. In one sequence, Kobby uses the opening of Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby – “a novel investigating the murderous motives of Louise, its psychotic maid” – as fodder for his gruesome fantasy. “I see Louise in Nana anytime I watch him summon an orderly cleanliness into the mess we leave behind,” Kobby tells us. “I find myself fantasising about the moment Nana snaps. Like Louise. His choice of weapon digging into our bodies as he splatters the messy art of our lazy lives on to the white walls, painting an entire apartment with our privilege.”
