Tim Jones
Dead Ends by Laura Borrowdale (Tender Press, 2025), 152pp, $30.00 and The Emotion Dealer and other stories by Jack Remiel Cottrell (Canterbury University Press, 2025), 136pp, $29.99
Together, Jack Remiel Cottrell’s second short story collection, The Emotion Dealer and other stories, and Laura Borrowdale’s second short story collection, Dead Ends, show how the scope of short fiction in Aotearoa has widened in recent years. No longer are the mimetic and the speculative sworn enemies, reduced to glowering at each other from opposing bookshop shelves; instead they nestle side by side in collections of short fiction such as these. Both collections explore a range of genres—while The Emotion Dealer and other stories also reveals Cottrell stretching his wings across longer forms of story, as well as showcasing the flash fictions he has been best known for up to now.
Right from the beginning of Dead Ends it is immediately clear that Laura Borrowdale is a very skilled and accomplished short story writer. Every story in this collection is of high literary quality—though also quite similar in length and emotional effect. Many of these tales live at a tri-point, where science fiction, fantasy and horror meet. What-if scenarios—such as ‘what if leaving a relationship required losing body parts’, or ‘what if their mothers’ reproaches follow women around in the physical form of ghosts’—play out in grim narratives that expose cruelty and misogyny. The remaining stories are mimetic fiction rather than science fiction or fantasy or horror, but cover similar emotional territory.
Borrowdale’s stories demonstrate strong control of narrative voice. Whether I, we, you or she are driving the narration, small groups of characters, often related—grandparents and children; parents and children; carers; guards—fail to provide what others need: the original sins of violence and indifference will stain future generations.
The most common emotion in these stories is dread. There is usually an apocalypse on the horizon, minor or major, personal or collective. The two ends of that spectrum are particularly visible in ‘Guilt Trip’, and in ‘Ripe’—the latter, despite its particular bleakness, was for me the best story in an impressive assembly.
‘Guilt Trip’ lays its cards on the table from the start:
My mother’s ghost stands beside me as I do the dishes. It hovers halfway in and halfway out of the kitchen cabinet, as transparent as steam, fading the cabinetry to a rusty orange.
‘That water’s too hot,’ it says. ‘You’ll wreck your hands. They’ll be all nasty and red by the time you’ve finished.’
I slide the slimy dishcloth over the dishes.
The ghost looks at the plate in the drying rack. There’s a grainy trail of mashed potato on the back.
‘What?’ I say. ‘That’s what drying them is for.’ But I pick the plate back up and run it under the tap.
Mum’s ghost here makes Banquo’s revenant look like a lightweight. The narrator and her children embark on a fraught journey to return the ghost to its owner, who is no more enthusiastic about this mission than the ghost is.
‘Guilt Trip’ leans on humour more than horror. But ‘Ripe’, an allegory that could not be more timely, is very much the reverse: villagers desperate to protect what they have against ‘the outsiders’ of an apocalyptic world submit to authority, and are consumed:
The patrol leader stepped out and around the man. He stood behind him with his baton in one hand, thudding repeatedly into the palm of the other. ‘What would you have us do?’ he said.
‘We march for days,’ said the man on the ground. ‘We starve and never see our families, never see the things we are guarding.’ His voice began to lift in pitch, to get louder. ‘I do not believe there is a threat! I do not believe you treat us fairly! I do not beli—’
The patrol leader’s baton came down hard on the back of his head. There was a thud, then a noise like a ripe tomato splattering on baked earth.
Each of these stories is tightly constructed and compressed. Their cumulative effect is like stepping on a series of coiled springs that might, at any moment, decide to release and catapult the unwary reader above a landscape smeared with mud and blood and exhausted bodies—with women and men trying, and often failing, to cling on. Dead Ends is an accomplished and absorbing short story collection. I’d be keen to see what happens should Borrowdale decide to apply her formidable and dextrous writing technique to a wider range of material.
The title story in Jack Remiel Cottrell’s The Emotion Dealer and other stories is a novella, and it’s not the only longer piece of writing in the collection. Like a music fan whose first reaction to a band’s second album is ‘Why isn’t it exactly the same as their first album?!’, I was a little taken aback by this at first—I really enjoyed the exciting, funny, high-concept flash fictions in Jack’s debut collection Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson, and I came to this second collection looking for more of the same.
But flash fiction fans need have no fear—there is still plenty of very short fiction here, with pertinent titles like ‘New datasets for machine learning now that the entire internet isn’t enough information’. The imprint of AI’s clammy fingers on our present and future is a frequent theme in this collection, with humanity often in befuddlement and retreat. ‘New datasets’ is one of several stories here that takes the form of a list. There’s a lot you can do, creatively and narratively, with a list, and just as in his first collection, Cottrell is very good at putting the form to uses playful, tragic or melancholic. Two other forms of organising information topologically related to lists, the algorithm and the mail-merged letter, turn up to good advantage too. You might think neither of these have strong literary possibilities, but in this collection, Cottrell enshrines their place in the literary pantheon.
‘Three secrets, two wishes, and a promise’—my favourite story in The Emotion Dealer and other stories—is not, despite its title, a list. In it, Hemi and his twin sister Frannie prepare for the sixth-form dance:
Hemi moved aside so Frannie could join him at the mirror. They stared for a moment, in each other’s ball outfits, looking better than they would when they had to wear their own.
‘You’re very handsome, Fran,’ said Hemi, repaying her compliment from a few minutes earlier.
‘I am, aren’t I?’ she replied, smiling. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever worn a suit before.’
‘I haven’t worn a dress since we were about six,’ said Hemi.
Both the interplay between the twins and Hemi’s thoughts about his identity and his place in his family are beautifully described in this lovely, gentle story.
The Emotion Dealer and other stories sees Cottrell stretching his fiction not only in terms of length but also tone. ‘The Edge of Nowhere’, a nine-page story, reminded me of Frank Sargeson and similar writers of grizzled economy, as does the tense hunting story ‘Camouflaged’—a men-in-the-wilderness tale very far removed in tone from ‘Three secrets, two wishes, and a promise’:
After several more hours, Bernie stopped, nodded, and said, ‘Here’s the spot.’ He and Brent began unslinging their rifles and taking out bullets, so Robbie followed their example, trying not to ask questions. …
After he loaded his gun, he remembered how Sarah transformed when her father and brothers were around—stiff, holding herself in tight, and jumping if Robbie touched her leg while they sat watching television. He thought of how easy it would be right now to remove some of that anxiety. They’d never expect it. At this range, he couldn’t miss.
One of my favourite things about both these collections is the way they slip between speculative genres and mimetic fiction. Along with stories whose lineage stretches back to Frank Sargeson and John Mulgan, Cottrell gives us philosophically inclined science fiction, such as ‘The Basilisk’, which fictionalises the philosophical concept of Roko’s Basilisk, a contemporary spin on Pascal’s Wager.
By far the longest story in the book, the title novella ‘The Emotion Dealer’, is also based on a what-if: what if emotions could be decanted, synthesised, traded? What if the dealer becomes the mark in such a transaction? The novella is well constructed and beautifully written—Cottrell really does have a lovely way of combining words on a page, and tight control of tone—but I don’t think it’s quite as successful as many of the other stories in the book. For me, it’s a bit too controlled, too steady, lacking the flashes of excitement that animate the best work here. The story feels like a ball rolling down a track—I wanted a couple of speed bumps on the way, the occasional unexpected swerve, a sudden loop-the-loop that took the story to places I wasn’t expecting.
But how exciting, to see such a fine writer building on the strengths of his first collection and taking longer flights across the map of fiction!
Books like Dead Ends and The Emotion Dealer and other stories show that, despite periodic threats of its commercial extinction, the art of the short story in Aotearoa continues to be both fertile territory for our writers and indispensable to our literary landscape. These two exemplary collections are well worth your time and your attention.
TIM JONES was born in England, grew up in Southland and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He is an author, poet and editor. His recent books include the poetry collection New Sea Land (Mākaro Press, 2016) and the climate fiction novel Emergency Weather (The Cuba Press, 2023). His latest book is the poetry collection Dracula in the Colonies (The Cuba Press, 2025).
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