Lust breeds monsters in the full-length debut from the author of “Cat Person”
Aux Features Book Review
It’s a tale as old as Facebook: An unknown author at the start of their career writes a story. It becomes a viral phenomenon, launching a thousand hot takes and think pieces about whether it rightfully or not reflects These Troubled Times. Amid the tsunami of debates, analyses, and debates over these analyses, a seven-figure two-book deal ensues, followed closely by a movie contract. We’ve seen the mad rush to capitalize on internet ephemera before, but what set Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” apart was how unlikely a candidate it was to grasp the nation’s fickle attention. The short story, about a date gone wrong, was lauded as the fictional encapsulation of the #MeToo movement, and critiqued for it as well. After the dust settled, the question that remained was whether the response to the story was more intriguing than the work itself.
Roupenian’s full-length debut, You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” And Other Stories, is meant to supply an answer. The 12 short stories in the collection explore the dangerously sadistic power dynamics between genders, rarely shying away from the uncomfortable and outright gruesome outcomes of desire. A 12-year-old girl has a menacing interaction with a drifter. A woman fantasizes over biting her womanizing coworker. A guy looking to hook up on Tinder gets more than he bargains for. It’s a work that will kindle Twitter rage threads that begin with “Let’s be clear” and satiate those that end with an ironic #notallmen. Therein lies its appeal and its chief problem. While the book can be engaging and deliciously creepy at times, it’s also schematic in its diagnosis of human nature in the way that so many social media debates tend to be.
Readers expecting “Cat Person” in different variations may be surprised to find this to be a gory book. The unflinching depictions of physical cruelty as a reflection of the psychological harm we are willing to carry out on others is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. It’s a stylistic choice that is announced with the opener, “Bad Boy,” a deeply unsettling story of a couple that sexually torments their heartbroken friend. There is punching, biting, kicking, cutting, piercing, chewing, hissing, crawling, slashing. Blood makes a recurring appearance. These stories may leave readers squirming, sometimes with tension, often with revulsion, and Roupenian is extremely skilled at escalating the stakes. “Love breeds monsters” appears etched on the body of one character, which seems to be the author’s main point: We can easily become monsters of our lust, if we feel entitled enough to act on it.
This commitment to portraying the human body as a potential site for gruesomeness is best served in the several horror stories peppered throughout. At times, the collection feels like two different books in their own power struggle (how Roupenian of them), with genres varying wildly from realism to fabulism to even paranormal goth. In “Scarred,” for example, a woman conjures a man to fulfill her desires, though it can only be done through the torture of his flesh. “The Mirror, The Bucket And The Old Thigh Bone” centers on a princess whose sexual infatuation with her reflection ends up deforming her. While at times these stories feel like intruders, they’re welcome ones. The condemnations of each of their protagonists make sense in a universe of fantastic creatures, black magic, and faraway kingdoms.
The oversimplification of victim and victimizer in the other stories, though, is more tiring. The prose tends to be sparse, providing little context that could ground us in any specific location, socioeconomic reality, or detailed world that could inform the characters, allowing readers to project their own grievances in the fictional situation that unfolds. Roupenian eschews any sort of moral complexity by spelling out every problematic and downright creepy thought in the antagonists’ heads. “The Good Guy,” a story almost cloyingly self-conscious of its potential as a crowd-pleaser, is a character study of a run-of-the-mill asshole who doesn’t understand why women think he’s an asshole. It begins with a bang (pun intended):
By the time he was thirty-five, the only way Ted could get hard and remain so for the duration of sexual intercourse was to pretend that his dick was a knife, and the woman he was fucking was stabbing herself with it.
Roupenian’s work declares that there is no fun in reading between the lines, and this kind of obvious symbolism can be grating. Any straight woman who’s been on a date, let alone hundreds, will be able to predict each step of Ted’s psychological evolution from nerdy boy stuck in the friend zone to a commitment-phobe adult. Don’t worry, he’ll get the comeuppance he deserves. Any nuance brought to play in these morality tales is lost by the end, in favor of a resounding judgment.
For a book that relishes the messy carnage of relationships, it’s frustrating to have literal and metaphorical bloodshed be resolved in so a tidy manner. A few shine because of their restraint, most notably “The Matchbox Sign,” in which a straight couple’s life is upended by the girlfriend’s mysterious skin condition, and “The Boy In The Pool,” in which a woman plans a bachelorette party for her former high school crush with the goal of fulfilling the bride-to-be’s teen fantasy.
Still, these are rare. What we get, time and again, are more predictable outcomes, usually tainted with a degree of shock value, so readers can be absolved of any upsetting ambiguity by clearly knowing who deserved what and who is left to tend to their wounds. Roupenian raises difficult questions. One wishes her answers were just as challenging.
24 Comments
“Cat Person” was okay though I thought the version with Simone Simon was scarier
The sequel was lauded by educators as a great film for children, though I don’t think there are any cats in it. Paul Schrader’s remake seems mostly notable for David Bowie’s music.
I liked Curse of the Cat People though Simone Simon had less to do. The Paul Schrader remake was awful though the music and Natassja Kinski and especially Annette O’Toole were memorable.
It does sound like some of these stories try to put out the fire with gasoline, though.
Does a scenario exist in which Natassja Kinski would not be memorable?
Fun fact: i took this really literary-based cinema studies class for my Master’s Degree. The professor started with this movie because it was her favorite, and she wanted to point out that even she loved bad movies.
“Roupenian’s work declares that there is no fun in reading between the lines, and this kind of obvious symbolism can be grating.”I guess this makes sense. My opinion of “Cat Power” was that it was a really well written and interesting story that undermined itself right at the end when the male character insults the female character with a sexist obscenity; the ambiguity of his character – the frisson I felt as a male reader who in some ways resembles that character, and who worries that people might assume I resemble him in even more ways – is stripped away. It doesn’t make the story feel untrue (that guy definitely exists!) but it makes the story feel simpler and the guy becomes a lot easier to pigeonhole. So I thought it was a misstep at the end of the story … until I read an interview where the author said that she built the story backwards from that moment. So there you go.
Agree with this. I thought it was too easy of an out. The nature of his character is that he would most likely not do something so brazen, but rather wallow in his misery and rejection and possibly end up in a very bad place. Was interested in reading a full collection of her work, as there were some brilliant observations in that “Cat Person” story, but that opening line of “The Good Guy”…sheesh.
Completely agreed. The story has a delicate touch up until then (it may not be subtle, but it really breathes), and then it kinda wrenches the subtext out from the text–and makes it the closing line, no less! Why give that character the last word? I guess maybe it’s supposed to reflect the bad taste it’ll leave for the other lead character, but it’s like a sudden switch from scalpel to carving knife.
Yea she removed any ambiguity from the situation. It’s been a while since I read “Cat Person” but I remember feeling uncomfortable (in a good way, if that makes sense) as I read it because I felt like I could find sympathy and empathy for the guy even though I knew he was supposed to be gross and entitled – but I was just finding him pathetic and, at worst, annoying. And then at the end it’s like BOOM yea he’s a dangerous fucking asshole.
Yeah, that ending made me question whether or not the preceding story was actually supposed to be as ambiguous about both character’s behaviour as I’d read it to be, or if that had been an accident and the author had intended it to be a black and white narrative that hadn’t come across the way she’d intended.
My exact impression too. A well-written short story about all the ambiguities of dating and relationships. And then at the very end, she turns the guy into an utter monster. Apparently many people thought this fictional short story was a real-life memoir, and the author, who is a lesbian, has taken pains to correct that impression. But I agree, it was a great story until that gotcha! all men are terrible ending . I was into the story, and I could see how the guy in it was insecure, nervous and scared too. But at the end, this shitty twist- he was a villain all along! Because nasty texts that she decided the character would send. I mean, what choir is she singing to here? She wrote somewhere about what a terrible burden that sudden internet fame an a magnificent lucrative book deal has brought her, poor darling. But yeah, the ending of that short story seemed tacked-on and shitty.
I wouldn’t want to be internet famous. Have you met the internet?
i agree mostly. I think it let the main character off the hook from some of the more odious parts of her character. The male character is not a good guy by any means, but her main character spends a lot of time insulting him in her descriptions. I felt with that moment at the end it was to help justify the fact that she spent so many words fat-shaming him.
I have mixed feelings about this, but yeah. I mean, “naive and confused young woman dates perplexing older man she doesn’t realize is hatefully sexist until after the fact” is a valid story that could be very interesting, it just didn’t feel like the story I was reading until the moment that it was. And there’s a lot to say about the territory in which guys who seem like the male character wind up resorting to sexist, violent language (or worse, violent actions). But since he’s a cipher to us (since he’s a cipher to the protagonist), the revelation lands like a punchline to something that I didn’t realize was going to have a punchline.
I think that’s the word I was looking for: punchline. We got a kind of build up of two not great people, and the punchline seemed to want to turn it into all his fault. Not that he was right, not that he was great, not that anyone has any right to talk to anyone else like that, but it just seems more like missed opportunites, then thinkpieces trying to retroactively justify the whole thing. Like we were watching someone murder a bunch of people, then in the end the person is caught, and the police offer says, “oh, all of those people were murders, too, so you saved us.”
Sounds like “Tales from the Crypt”… guess I’ll buy it, then
Apparently HBO is making an anthology series based on it, so this comparison may be more apt than you realized!
“Regular Mirror.”
“Now what if we had — and stay with me here — a lady Crypt Keeper?!?”
Cool
“Cloyingly self-conscious of its potential as a crowd-pleaser.”This is a pretty good description of how I felt about “Cat Person” so I’m not surprised if other stories in the collection followed suit. I liked some of the ideas that Roupenian played around with, but not the execution or the style necessarily. If anyone felt similarly, I might recommend Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties or Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls as alternatives, both of which are really fabulous short story collections that manage to balance realism and fabulism through effective, evocative imagery and darkly comic moments.
I’m like the one person on earth who never read Cat Person. But I did pre-order this.
The lack of nuance in this follow-up to Cat Person seems to confirm my suspicions that the ambiguity in that story which led to so much debate was an accident, and that it was actually intended to be much more black and white about its themes and narrative than how it came across.