Patron Saints of Roadkill by Susanne Elliffe

Susanna Elliffe’s Patron Saints of Roadkill & Other Stories is a dark, strange and impressive debut collection that announces a writer with a strong command of unease. Across seventeen stories, Elliffe returns to bodies, coastlines, ghosts, animals, hunger and inheritance, creating a world in which grief does not remain abstract. It coughs up teeth, takes animal form, inhabits houses, presses against skin and seeps into landscape.

The collection’s settings are often coastal, but the sea is not simply atmospheric. It is pressure, threat and memory. Towns sit under the possibility of being reclaimed. Houses tilt. Human lives are shown as porous, vulnerable to weather, family history, appetite and the nonhuman world. Elliffe’s fiction makes the familiar unstable without losing emotional clarity. Her characters may find themselves beside ghosts, roadkill shrines or an octopus with unexpected domestic talents, yet their dilemmas remain recognisable: loneliness, abandonment, damaged love, shame, longing and the difficult work of surviving what has happened.

One of the collection’s pleasures is its appetite for transformation. In stories such as “Blue Blood, No Bones”, where a seven-armed octopus enters the life of a broken-hearted woman, Elliffe allows the surreal to become tender rather than merely bizarre. Elsewhere, the grotesque is sharper, closer to horror, but even then it tends to emerge from emotional truth. The strangeness does not feel decorative. It gives shape to feelings that realistic fiction can sometimes smooth over too quickly.

Elliffe is also a sentence-level writer. Her openings are arresting, often carrying the snap of a fable or curse, and her prose moves between lyricism, bluntness and bodily vividness. At its best, the language has a rhythm that makes the stories feel half-spoken, half-ritualised, as though the collection is drawing on fairy tale, prayer and local gossip all at once. There is formal play too, with words arranged visually on the page in ways that support emotional pressure rather than distract from it.

The collection’s intensity is also its risk. Some stories are so dense with image and atmosphere that the reader may occasionally want a little more plain air, or a clearer path through the emotional and narrative terrain. The prose can snag when its metaphors crowd too closely together. Yet this excess is part of Elliffe’s developing force. She writes as though ordinary language has proved inadequate for ordinary suffering, so something stranger must be summoned.

What makes Patron Saints of Roadkill compelling is its refusal to turn trauma into neat recovery. Children wander, mothers fail, ghosts linger, appetites persist and nature does not offer easy consolation. Even so, the book is not bleak in a simple sense. It contains tenderness, humour and flashes of odd grace. Elliffe gives the discarded and damaged their own forms of attention, whether human, animal or spectral.

This is a confident and original debut from a writer already willing to take risks with form, image and feeling. Patron Saints of Roadkill & Other Stories belongs to the eerie, visceral edge of contemporary Aotearoa fiction, where the coastline shifts, the dead are not finished, and the strange may be the most honest way to tell the truth.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

The Cuba Press