Dregs

Description

Girls who join dog packs, boys who gain strength from trees, men who love bodies with nobody in them: Dregs is a collection of tenderly-monstrous love stories, set in a shadowy small town of the same name. Based in South Canterbury, New Zealand, these lovingly disturbing fictions welcome the strange and other-wordly, while keeping an ethnographic eye trained on the classed, religious, gendered, racialised and species-based forces shaping this rural region of New Zealand’s South Island.

While at times grotesque, these darkly loving, richly-illustrated tales offer new avenues for ethnographic research and shed new light on the region, giving voice and form to unspoken aspects of this antipodean rural idyll. Shaped by a deep respect for the monstrous feminine, regardless of the gender of the bodies in which such forces appear, Dregs: Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand is a product of both an anthropological sensibility and a trust that naming and finding ways to live well with our monsters is a vital aspect of living well in our times.