The Emotion Dealer
by Jack Remiel Cottrell

This is the second collection of stories by Jack Remiel Cottrell (Ngāti Rangi). His debut, Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson, established him as a master of precision-cut short fiction and also as a guy with a knack for great titles. The stories of that collection were honed to a brevity that could easily have turned airless or claustrophobic; instead the best of them operated like an extra-dimensional fairground ride, intent on discovering new universes.

It is in these universes that The Emotion Dealer lives. The 45 stories of Cottrell’s second collection are more varied in length than the stories of his first. Many stand out for their wit, invention, or alchemical reality-bending: cutting-edge technologies agitate against rural Gothic unease, iPhone-shiny speculative worlds tarnish on contact. His shrewd eye particularly excels at drawing the absurd and the dystopian from seemingly ordinary scenarios, their narratives suggesting an unease akin to briefly lifting the frog out of the heating pot, just long enough for it to glimpse the creeping horror in which it was soaking.

Several pieces explore a theme that could be loosely described as ‘humans failing badly at living with technology’. ‘There is glitter in our veins that will long outlast our bones’ spans epochs in barely half a page, moving from dinosaurs surrendering their flesh for oil to star systems. This is dystopian horror dancing to the beat of a cosmic folk song, while adding an unexpected layer to Carl Sagan’s famous quote ‘We are made of star-stuff.’ The story ‘The right to be forgotten’ extends the metaphor of the World Wide Web by sitting us with an actual spider, skittling into the tangle of digital lives we can never fully erase – ‘The unfortunate ones find themselves captured by the spider, scraped up and crammed into its gullet, trapped in a web of ill-fitting matrices, unable to twitch. Unable to hide’. This is a clever, unsettling riff on the ways we trap ourselves online. ‘The basilisk’ is a sharp, playful riddle that grapples with the conundrum between awareness and ignorance, an inventive twist on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil reframed through a ‘friendship’ with a bot. ‘Learn phrases you’ll really need to use!’ has some laugh-out-loud lines and the funniest punchline.

The title story is the collection’s heftiest and most ambitious, exploring a future where naturally occurring human chemicals are extracted, commodified, and sold. It is a clever piece that draws blood from synthetic imitators, black-market economies, corporate pressure, and the hoarding of rare commodities; its themes suggests the art world, the gemstone industry and greed-fuelled plunder for private collections.

The story’s disquieting pursuit of the sublime and its sensory obsessions recalls Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. In a tense and thrilling Black Mirror-worthy plotline, Cottrell probes our modern disconnection and the ways we have replaced genuine moments with artificial surrogates, from mindless scrolling for dopamine hits to painkillers both prescribed and illicit:

…..‘I wanna feel happy,’ said the dishevelled young man in my living room. His eyes didn’t meet my face, instead darting around to take in the rows of small, delicate bottles locked in the cabinets behind me.

…..‘You got anything that can make me happy?’

…..‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I have happiness. Organic or synthetic?’

…..I had something that could make him feel happy, but nothing to actually make him happy. Not that the difference mattered to him.

…..‘How much is organic?’ he asked, and I didn’t hide my smirk. This guy couldn’t afford organic.

…..‘Pony.’

…..‘That’s a lot.’

…..‘Organic feelings are expensive.’

‘Camouflaged’, perhaps the most conventional tale in both structure and theme, embraces a familiar Aotearoa trope, that of nasty blokes doing bad things in the bush – the kind of taut and unsettling drama so beloved in our short films and literary journals. (‘The hand gripping his shoulder was attached to a heavy silhouette looming over him, outlined by the orange dawn. Then, his heart still pounding, the shape resolved itself into the outline of Brent, his soon-to-be brother-in-law.’). The story unfurls with a pace and darkness that conjure headlines we all recognise: unsolved rural murders, disappearances witnessed by none, Kiwi masculinity at its most corrosive.

Several pieces linger for a different reason. ‘Three secrets, two wishes, and a promise’ is powered by a simple need to be seen as you are. Hemi remembers himself at the age of ten, trying on his sister’s dress – and his father catching him, giving him ‘the worst thrashing of his life’. In the story ‘In lieu of’, Cottrell uses the simple arrival of flowers after a death to show how raw grief distorts the mundane and tests our emotional resources:

One month after my little brother died, people were still sending flowers. My mother and I knew the names of all the couriers who walked up five flights of stairs to reach our apartment, and we could tell who was delivering from the way they pressed our doorbell.

These are stories that form the channels between the other pieces, carrying oxygen to lungs and brain, gut and heart.