You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian's debut collection of short stories, includes 12 stories that tackle the nuanced and often monstrous dynamics of sexual power. The collection includes "Cat Person," the viral short story originally published in a December 2017 issue of the New Yorker. There are other standouts, such as "The Nice Guy," which follows seemingly innocuous Ted, who gets off on imagining women mutilating themselves. In "Biter," a young women lies in wait for the perfect moment to sink her teeth into men, and "Look at Your Game, Girl" reimagines the infamous kidnap and murder of Polly Klaas through the eyes of a girl who wasn't taken.
All of Roupenian's stories have a dark aura that hypnotically draws in readers, similar to the "glow of the phone like a campfire illuminating their faces" in "Cat Person." The prose is clean and slick, as writhing and slippery as the characters. Some stories approach reality with an eye for the surreal, locating moments of disjuncture and unease in everyday life. Others, like "Sardines" and "Death Wish," approach the surreal with an eye for the real, drawing out moments of eerie recognition from unrecognizable contexts. The men and women in Roupenian's stories are wonderfully grotesque as they follow their desires obsessively. In an uncomfortable but fascinating form of voyeurism, the reader may feel compelled to urge these characters on, both yearning and fearing the climax, picking at the blister until it breaks. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor