Remember ‘Cat Person’? The viral short story published in The New Yorker last year that literally everyone you know sent to you with the message ‘Oh my god, you HAVE to read this!’? Well the author, Kristen Roupenian, has published a collection of short stories with the tempting title ‘You Know You Want This’.
I heard about the book via a podcast interview with the author herself. It centered on Roupenian’s shock and amazement at the juggernaut that Cat Person became, and her new book which I was surprised to hear had a significant focus on the horror genre. Like everyone, I read and loved Cat Person. I’m also a horror junkie who loves a good short story, so I quickly bought the book and sunk my teeth in. I had high expectations.
It pains me to say, this novel is largely rubbish.
There are 12 short stories in the collection, and three of them are good (including ‘Cat Person’, ‘Bad Boy’, and ‘The Good Guy’).
The nine remaining stories were all the ‘horror’ stories, one of which was somewhat serviceable I guess (‘The Matchbox Sign’, a body-horror story about a possibly-imagined parasitic infestation). The rest were the most bizarrely written and poorly paced short stories I’ve ever read. They seemed like truly juvenile attempts at horror, each of which left my scratching my head going ‘what the heck did I just read?’. I read this book while on a roadtrip, and each morning when setting out to our next destination, I’d retell the story I’d read the night before to my husband. It was in those retellings that the awfulness of each story became most clear to me:
“So there is a tweenage girl’s birthday party, and her mom has convinced her ex-husband (the girl’s father) to host the party. During the party, the mom brings out a cake with one of those cheap dollar-store novelty candles that sings and spins. The girl makes a wish, then tells everyone to play ‘Sardines’ (a game where one person hides, and everyone goes to find them. When each person finds them, they then join them in their hiding spot, packing in like sardines until everyone has found them). The mom starts snooping around and day drinking, losing track of time. She eventually realises night has fallen and the game is still going (?!). She then goes into the woods and finds that the party guests have become stuck together in a giant puddle of screaming flesh (like in the movie ‘Slither’), with only the mom and the birthday girl remaining. They hold hands, and the girl says something about re-doing her birthday wish. Oh, and while day drinking the mother thinks about how her daughter smells bad, has acne, and uneven budding breasts.”
See what I mean? It’s like Roupenian published a muddled diary of her nightmares. All the horror elements were under-cooked and underwhelming. She took sudden left-hand turns that made no sense to me, and nothing packed any punch. It was just plain odd.
Notably, the three good short stories in the collection had no real horror elements. They were instead grounded in the reality of toxic, manipulative people and unhealthy relationships. I believe this is where Roupenian’s strengths lie. She genuinely understands power imbalances in relationships and how nefarious people can seize them and use them to their advantage. She can express the subtleties of masculine toxicity with extreme skill. I particularly enjoyed how the question of the manipulative couple’s gender in ‘Bad Boy’ was left completely unspoken. It indirectly made me seriously question my unconscious hetero-normative bias, which I loved!
If Roupenian sticks to her strengths, I’ll gladly read her future publications. But I wouldn’t touch her horror stories ever again.
2 steaming porch turds out of 5.