Off the rails

elen Oyeyemi is a bamboozler, a dis-combobulator, a peddler of perplexity. She crushes fables and fairytales down to a powder and then laces her fiction with it like some kind of literary hallucinogen. In her most recent books, the British author seems to have been experimenting with how much expository and explanatory weight she can jettison to make space for filigree and romp. In 2019’s Gingerbread, the result was something akin to immersive theatre – an invitation to explore. What we lost in orientation, we