You Know You Want This - Kristen Roupenian

Yes, this is the same person who wrote Cat Person - the only short story to ever go viral. And viral it did. Carried away on a #MeToo tailwind it's probably one of my least favourite stories in this collection. The irony of many Twitter followers loving and ‘relating’ to that story without realising the joke was mostly on them. Relating to Margot or Robert meant you were a bit of an insipid self-obsessed loser but maybe that was the point. The other stories in You Know You Want This are far more interesting and will probably never be read by 80% of the millions who went into a Twitter spack about Cat Person. Kristen has, in an era of - this story is really about me - an ability to actually imagine which is kind of how I like my fiction. Her stories are also fucking dark and a little bit sick. So are her characters. Not matter what they identify as. A funny and really unsettling human soup. My favourites are Biter about a woman who likes to bite people and has since she was a kid and The Boy in the Pool - an eerie resurrection of a teen celebrity crush at a hen’s night. These stories start out seemingly normal, mostly 'now' and then veer into something more primal and strange. The other story I didn't like was The Good Guy which was the longest and an even worse attempt than Cat Person at capturing contemporary male malaise. Skip it. The rest are damn good.