Review: The Pets We Have Killed, by Barbara Else

The Pets We Have Killed. It is – if you’ll excuse me – a killer title, named for the final short story in long-established New Zealand author Barbara Else’s new collection. This latest book, hard on the heels of the memoir Laughing at the Dark (Penguin, 2023), marks a return to adult fiction for Else, whose publishing career includes six adult novels and seven books for children including the popular Go Girl, A Storybook of Epic New Zealand Women. 

The Pets We Have Killed may have just hit the bookshops, but alongside several new stories, parts of the book reach back into the archives of Else’s work, including a piece first published in literary magazine Salient in 1988. The collection explores the bounds of genre and form, from realist domestic stories of ‘ordinary’ women navigating relationships and motherhood, to forays into science fiction and dystopian futures. Else’s finely-tuned writing is remarkable for its brevity, saying just enough to bring the reader on the journey with the characters. Telling stories of whole lives in a few pages feels effortless, disguising the author’s clear skill for selecting essential details.

Of the 18 stories in the collection, a chunk dwell successfully in the realm of movement from girlhood to womanhood. Themes of sex and love worm through the pages. Often the young female protagonists are naive, expected to operate half in and half out of the adult world with little knowledge or guidance. Confidence follows narrator Dinah from childhood to married life as she tries to find answers to questions of love and sex; questions she knows not to ask or which have been shoved under the rug by the people around her. In the title story, a young teenager tries to decode the behaviour of her many ‘sisters’ when a man enters their dystopian community for the purposes of breeding. The narrator sums it up with this reflection, ‘it wasn’t fair, the way women kept things from you until you were a woman yourself.’

The persistent worry of motherhood features in the strongest of the stories. In quiet realist pieces Else dwells in the everyday with her ‘ordinary’ female protagonists navigating parenthood. In Moonbeam, a solo mother battles with her teenage son while the ghost of his absent father and the oppressive fog of the pandemic weighs heavily on them both. In Imaginary Friends Covid again taints the atmosphere as a young mother struggles to interpret the inner world of her four-year-old son, played off against her memories of blurred lines between childhood fantasy and memory. In File: On Woman, 30 a wife and mother struggles to adjust to a move from a small town to the city. In each, Else successfully captures a profound aloneness, artfully rendering the hollowing out of a person who must put the needs of others ahead of her own.

Many of the pieces are brief, most just six or seven pages, yet often spanning long periods of time, jump cutting in some cases from childhood to parenthood to old age. There is variety in the writing form, from traditional narratives to stories written partially in letters between medical professionals, to an imagining of a policy analyst in 2075 proposing a new electoral system. Of these more experimental pieces, New Elections and Darklings stood out for their more didactic approach, drawing clear lines to climate change anxiety and politics in a way that leaves them less at home alongside other stories in the collection.

It’s worth saying, I think, that no pets were murdered in the making of this book. As well as capturing attention, the title does two jobs. Firstly, it reminds me of the old writing expression ‘kill your darlings,’ meaning to get rid of any unnecessary words or phrases in your writing - even those which are beloved - if they don’t serve the story. Here, Barbara Else demonstrates her prowess with the red pen, leaving only what is necessary. Secondly, the title feels expansive, spanning time across past, present and future, just as these stories do for both the author and her characters. Anna Scaife is a graduate of the Masters of Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her short fiction has appeared in Landfall, Newsroom, takahē, Turbine, Flash Frontier and At the Bay | Te Kokuru.