Eleanor Black talks to Kirsten McDougall about her new apocalypse

Kirsten McDougall. Photo / Ebony Lamb

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.

"I really wanted to write a funny book but I'm deeply serious about these issues," says McDougall. "I guess the humour is to make it slightly more digestible to the reader and fun.

Alice is this total slacker; she has a near-genius IQ but she's done nothing with it. She's kind of horrible and while she does nothing about the chaos around her, she gets it. So we know that we are getting the true story, although she is your classic unreliable narrator. She's so blunt, she's not going to lie to you."

At 109,000 words, She's a Killer is a brick, far longer than anything McDougall has written before. (Tess, longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards and shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award, is 45,000 words.) McDougall takes the time to draw readers into a New Zealand in crisis. She's a Killer is intended as an alarm.

"I would like to see our Government actively and strongly pursue carbon neutral policies across every law they enact and I'm talking about housing, education, health, manufacturing, absolutely everything in the same way that they pursued the elimination strategy for Covid," says McDougall.

"And I know that it will be hard and I know our lives will have to change dramatically to pursue a carbon-neutral way of living but as a novelist part of my job is to imagine. There is so much joy to be found in imagining. You can imagine in a gloomy way about how bad things could get and that's important because it warns us, but we can imagine in a joyful way as well - what is possible?"

In 2019 McDougall, a publicist for Victoria University Press, took five months' unpaid leave to work on She's a Killer, writing 80,000 words in four months. "There's something about the energy and tone and texture in the scenes and the ones they lead into that requires sustained effort and you can feel it on the page if it's there or not," she says. "I don't think I could have done that if I had been writing part-time."

When she returned to work she hadn't finished the book, so spent 2020 adding and refining. The result is a clever and absorbing read - eco-novel meets thriller - with a likeable sociopath in the driver's seat. The emergence of our pandemic was woven into the story, which McDougall brought to life with support from her all-star writers' group, which includes Emily Perkins, Sue Orr and Sarah Laing.

"We all sit round a table at Elizabeth Knox's house and we share chapters or essays or whatever it is that we're working on. It's such an amazing group sometimes I go, 'How did I get to this point?'"

This year as last, local books have sold really well, so while it is disappointing to launch a book without a party in a bookshop, McDougall is optimistic about connecting with readers.

"There's a huge appetite for New Zealand stories," she says. "I certainly feel this as a reader. I'm looking for a way to understand what the hell is going on, not just because of the pandemic. There's so much rage, there's so much confusion and sadness, there's people trying to bully other people, so a piece of fiction is a way to step back and quietly think. One step after another - that's all you can do. And you try to do that kindly and as well as you can, and while you do that tread lightly on the planet."

She's A Killer, by Kirsten McDougall (VUP, $35), is out now.