You Know You Want This:

"Cat Person" and Other Stories

by Kristen Roupenian

Gallery/Scout Press

$24.99 List Price

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

Terrible things happen in Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This, a fact hinted at by the table of contents, which reads like a list of YA vampire novels: “Bad Boy,” “Death Wish,” “Scarred,” “Biter.” “I write horror stories,” the author told the Sunday Times last year. “The pull and push of revulsion and attraction is what the book revolves around.”

Roupenian is fascinated by the way power—in her stories, often bestowed by sex or magic—seesaws between people, temporarily elevating the lowly only to drop them back in the dirt where they belong. Her victims can sometimes gain enough leverage to become villains, but since they’re propelled by petty angers and relentless self-absorption, not even having the upper hand removes the taint of abjection. For Roupenian, human nature’s inherent ugliness is like gravity: briefly defiable yet inescapable. There are no heroes in this collection because there is no dignity. I think it is fair to call it a book “for our times.”

The opener, “Bad Boy,” is emblematic of what’s to come. A genderless couple is frustrated with their sad-sack friend, who keeps bumbling his way into bad relationships. Listening to him detail his latest breakup is “like listening to an alcoholic whine about being hungover.” But there’s something endearing about his spinelessness; he’s “like a sad little dog hungry for friendliness and praise.” The couple, it becomes clear, is like a different type of dog, one thirsty for blood. “We allowed ourselves to be irritable with him, to pick on him a bit,” they admit after the friend has become a more or less permanent

…