This short story collection was originally entitled You Know You Want This but quickly got changed to Cat Person and Other Stories because Cat Person became a hit online, got optioned and then made into a movie, and is by far the best story in this collection. It’d be amazing if the other 11 stories were even half as good as Cat Person but, alas, there’s only one other good story here - Look At Your Game Girl - and a middling one - The Mirror, The Bucket, and The Old Thigh Bone. The rest is cat litter.
Cat Person is about a young woman who goes on a date with an awkward older guy, and is about the pitfalls of modern dating, ie. the person they present themselves to be online vs the person they turn out to be in real life. It’s an inspired modern horror story that’s very subtle - the sense of menace really creeps up on you and keeps you guessing as to what’s going to happen until the end. Is the guy a serial killer or just a knucklehead? Great stuff.
Look At Your Game Girl is about a weird homeless guy who approaches a little girl in a park and tries to get her to meet him in the park after her bedtime. Despite knowing that she shouldn’t, she feels drawn to going anyway - but who is this guy? This one’s another brilliant, tense horror story that’s unpredictable. Tres Night Stalker.
The Mirror, The Bucket, and The Old Thigh Bone is a dark fairy tale about a princess who falls in love with a strange creature that forever changes her and her family’s lives. I didn’t love this as much as the two mentioned above, but it is captivating to see how the princess’ obsession escalates even if the conclusion is a bit weak and the moral somewhat underwhelming. Still, if you liked Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, this one fits into the same dark feminist fantasy vibe - and the imagery is quite haunting too.
Death Wish is about a man who hooks up with a woman who wants him to punch and then kick her before they have sex - but what’s in her suitcase? Biter is about a woman who fixates on biting a man at work. Both of these stories have intriguing premises but don’t really deliver on them. Women are just as messed up and evil as men seems to be the message. Meh.
I won’t go into the other seven stories - I didn’t enjoy them much; they didn’t have great setups or scenes, and were uniformly forgettable, though the writing is fine - but suffice it to say that they’re all horror-tinged and thematically about relationships and the complicated feelings of women in said (mostly toxic) relationships.
Kristen Roupenian’s written a couple of really good horror stories here. I love that they don’t rely upon horror cliches or even come across as of that genre initially - it’s a quality that Shirley Jackson shared, and the comparison is apt; Cat Person is up there with that level of storytelling. So for the title story alone and also Look At Your Game Girl, this collection is worth checking out, but I’d also recommend not bothering with the others here which are unsatisfying, tedious and plain boring. A library pick, rather than one to buy.
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