Imagine the end of the world as a long, rainy day in Wellington - life as we know it ending with a fizzle rather than a boom. Alice, a caustic 37-year-old university administrator, who has been treading water at work for 15 years, still has to catch the bus and go to the office despite signs of impending doom - water shortages, food scarcity and people fleeing the cities. Her best friend spends her days making sauerkraut to stock her bunker while also attempting to homeschool her children.
In Kirsten McDougall's very funny and troubling third novel, She's A Killer, climate change has rendered the world dim, as if it's turned down the saturation on our monitors. "One of the things I wanted to get at is how dreary the apocalypse is, I mean we're living it," says McDougall, a committed environmentalist. "I'm sorry but it is happening and you can't just pussyfoot around anymore."
In the book, locals are subsisting while wealthugees - rich foreigners displaced from their own countries who buy their way into New Zealand - dine at restaurants with armed guards, consuming $200 steaks and bottles of French wine that can never be produced again. They bring another wave of colonisation, claiming Māori land as their own.
It's a recognisable hellscape. Alice, a determined underachiever, can see the world crumbling around her but doesn't really care deeply about anything. She hooks up with a wealthugee named Pablo and considers how soon she can ask him to pay for cosmetic treatments: "Even if I didn't make it to 40, I wanted to move towards it with an expressionless forehead."
She lives in the same house as her mother (a woman who "would cling, Stalin-like to her meanness while the marrow dissolved in her bones") with whom she communicates using Morse code. Her imaginary friend Simp has returned after a 30-year absence, offering Alice advice on how to manage her relationships. It's a wonderfully weird and highly entertaining book while also laying out a plausible vision of our near-future.
