In future New Zealand, wealthy immigrants are creating chaos as they flee climate change, generally driving up food prices, illegally buying land and creating a huge divide between the have and have nots. In this environment, Alice, a 30 year old just one IQ point short of genius and who is generally an underachieving in life, finds that her childhood imaginary friend has returned. In a chain of events, she is thrown together with Erika, a 15 year old immigrant who draws Alice into her mysterious plans.

Kirsten McDougall has won recognition for her writing, in New Zealand, and wrote the well received and dark novella Tess. She’s A Killer is hard to define as far as genre. It’s set in a dystopian near future, where people are fleeing climate change and there’s a lot of corruption and hopelessness. It’s darkly funny sometimes and not taking itself too seriously or trying to have a message, but it’s also got a thriller plot, some of the time. It’s a little weird and hard to tie down in that sense. Perhaps the best definition is that it’s a character study.

Alice is our lead and at one point in the book, it is discussed that she’s most likely a sociopath. While she’s quite entertaining and often funny to read about, she would be pretty awful to know in person. She’s passive aggressive, manipulative, she can be a real bully, she has little to no empathy, she’s obsessed with her IQ points (though she didn’t strike me as being that far above the average), she has no self awareness, she’s vengeful, does not care how she impacts others and she lives in almost squalor. She has given up on trying, whether that’s having a meaningful life, taking care of herself, having friendships or relationships, or even on surviving the changing world around her. With her imaginary friend and her strange relationship with her mother (they live in the same house but only interact via morse code), if she’s not a sociopath, she may actually just be struggling to process the world and have some mental health issues. We never get a definitive answer. Either way, she’s a bit of a sad sack and her own worst enemy. As a character in a book, she’s kind of awesome to read about.

The book is often quite funny, in a very dark and cynical way. It makes fun of the corporate world and of people who are upbeat and oblivious, of people who are naively planning on surviving the end of the world, and of everything really. It reminded me of the smart slacker type humour from the 90’s, an attitude of being too smart and seeing through the thin veneer of everything, but also that it’s a coping mechanism: if you never try, you can never fail at anything. In a way, it’s brilliantly written, and I think, even though it’s topical, because it’s not earnest or trying to be edgy, it’s probably not going to date as badly as other books about the current world and climate change.

Dystopian futures were a lot more fun and stylish in the past. Now they are relentlessly dark and a little too real. Which meant that I didn’t always enjoy reading this book, even though it was startlingly different to what I often get my hands on and I do recommend it. It’s just so bleak to read about. The book doesn’t really have a message, which doesn’t help. The plotting really revolves around moving through Alice’s world seen through her eyes, so there’s lots of digressions where you just wonder what she’s going to do at work, or at the coffee shop or we meet characters and hear her thoughts on them. It’s not boring, but it’s not making a point about climate change, immigration, food prices, the end of the world, the corporate environment, though all those things are there as ideas. We don’t meet Erika til about halfway, and we don’t know much about her til even later. The thriller aspects of the book come from outside our lead and are imposed on her, don’t enter until late in the game, and then they go their own way. And Alice is not that different at the end of the book. Which I think is kind of the point, that’s how Alice is. And it’s kind of funny, but it feels incohesive sometimes or you wonder, what is the point here? Not every book has to have a strong message or theme, or even character growth, but all of those things make up the elements of a story, and it feels like missing them makes the whole thing a little soft in some way.

I think this one may be an acquired taste. I did find it dark and cynical in a way that was very entertaining and the authors grasp of character was excellent, I loved that it was a bit weird, so I do recommend it. I liked it. But it is a little depressing maybe and isn’t strongly plotted.

Read It If: a fresh voice out of NZ with a witty mind and a sense of dark humour. There is some excellent writing here, though it might not please all readers. I look forward to seeing what this author does next.

Thank you to PGC Books for the copy of this book for review.