Obligate Carnivore and other stories
by Stephanie Johnson
I won’t forget Obligate Carnivore anytime soon! Stephanie Johnson’s writing is excellent and her stories highly engaging.
The headline story, Obligate Carnivore, is about a cat called Gareth Morgan whose teeth are removed to stop him eating wildlife. Gareth falls into a decline so his owner gets him a set of false, human, teeth. This story reflects the tone of the book and is reflected by the cover. Many of the stories are macabre. And the cover is disturbing, striking, or weird, depending on your perspective.
The other aspect of the book’s cover that is being highlighted in the media is the role of AI in its creation. This has resulted in Obligate Carnivore being declared ineligible for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize of Fiction in the Ockham NZ Book Awards. Use of AI in the creative arts is a highly contentious issue. The decision to exclude books with any AI-generated content was intended to signal the scale of threat of AI to the book industry and the importance of human design in every aspect of books. Will use of AI-enhanced writing tools, such as Grammarly and ProWriting Aid, be next in the firing line?
The stories cover so many types of people, different ages, sex, backgrounds, values. I’m in awe of Stephanie’s ability to imagine such diversity in a very credible way. She looks into the little things that happen in life which are emblematic, or trigger points for major shifts in perspective.
Stephanie’s stories are insightful and clever. She makes her points from oblique angles – you don’t see them coming. Stephanie communicates universal narratives while setting her fiction in known places – New Zealand, particularly Auckland, and Sydney. Some themes are recurrent, such as marriage, divorce, and the nature of love, addiction, cats, aging, and environmental threats.
Stephanie highlights the peculiarities of humans in a sympathetic and humorous way in a book that is very much worth reading. I look forward to a future short story where Stephanie might take on the boundaries between creativity, AI, and human endeavour and rewrite where they lie.
by Stephanie Johnson
I won’t forget Obligate Carnivore anytime soon! Stephanie Johnson’s writing is excellent and her stories highly engaging.
The headline story, Obligate Carnivore, is about a cat called Gareth Morgan whose teeth are removed to stop him eating wildlife. Gareth falls into a decline so his owner gets him a set of false, human, teeth. This story reflects the tone of the book and is reflected by the cover. Many of the stories are macabre. And the cover is disturbing, striking, or weird, depending on your perspective.
The other aspect of the book’s cover that is being highlighted in the media is the role of AI in its creation. This has resulted in Obligate Carnivore being declared ineligible for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize of Fiction in the Ockham NZ Book Awards. Use of AI in the creative arts is a highly contentious issue. The decision to exclude books with any AI-generated content was intended to signal the scale of threat of AI to the book industry and the importance of human design in every aspect of books. Will use of AI-enhanced writing tools, such as Grammarly and ProWriting Aid, be next in the firing line?
The stories cover so many types of people, different ages, sex, backgrounds, values. I’m in awe of Stephanie’s ability to imagine such diversity in a very credible way. She looks into the little things that happen in life which are emblematic, or trigger points for major shifts in perspective.
Stephanie’s stories are insightful and clever. She makes her points from oblique angles – you don’t see them coming. Stephanie communicates universal narratives while setting her fiction in known places – New Zealand, particularly Auckland, and Sydney. Some themes are recurrent, such as marriage, divorce, and the nature of love, addiction, cats, aging, and environmental threats.
Stephanie highlights the peculiarities of humans in a sympathetic and humorous way in a book that is very much worth reading. I look forward to a future short story where Stephanie might take on the boundaries between creativity, AI, and human endeavour and rewrite where they lie.
Review by Jane Shearer
Title: Obligate Carnivore and other stories
Author: Stephanie Johnson
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9781991103369
RRP: $35
Available: bookshops
LATER NOTE
Since this review was published, The New Zealand Book Awards Trust has announced that two books previously disallowed because their covers were originated using AI, in contravention of the awards’ entry criteria, can be considered by the judges of the fiction category of the 2026 Ockham NZ Book Awards.
This ruling applies to the above book, Obligate Carnivore, and Angel Train by Elizabeth Smither – see the review 13 November, below.
For further details, see
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/12/05/ai-cover-ban-overturned-for-book-awards/
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