Beast Mode: A Review of Christina Rosso’s 'She is a Beast'

By Angelo Colavita

As children, we were read fairy tales, stories of romantic fantasy where heroic knights rescue damsels in distress from wicked witches and goblins. They allowed us to dream, to imagine, to wonder. By the time we reach adulthood, however, many of us learn to put childish things aside — to live in the real world, to strive for success, and for control. We look for that perfect spouse and save up money for a perfect home by working at our perfect jobs. But those things are often less than perfect. The world, unfortunately, is less than perfect. We are human and we fall short.

So, we look for an escape. Perhaps we revisit those old fairy tales that were read to us as children, looking for that same magic that once allowed us to dream. But now, we have been spoiled by life, by society. We’ve been indoctrinated into oppressive systems which keep us hoping and working and reaching for an unachievable fantasy that is not our own. Looking back on those old stories feels different. We can’t help but notice the imbalance of power and how those old tropes of yore have clouded our minds well into adulthood. They were all part of the system in the first place.

The women in these old fables do not exist. They have never existed. They had always belonged to someone else, either by captivity, violent punishment, or by marriage, living only for others and never for themselves.

Christina Rosso’s debut collection, She is a Beast, seeks to destroy those tropes which have reinforced and perpetuated the patriarchal, misogynist society we’ve grown to accept since our youth. In this collection of short stories, to be released by Apep Publications in early May (with gorgeous illustrations throughout by Apep’s founder, Jeremy Gaulke), Rosso turns the power dynamics towards her female protagonists’ favor by rewriting, restructuring, and re-establishing some of time’s most beloved canonical fairy tales, such as Beauty and the Beast (Killing the Beast), Cinderella (Husband by Midnight), and Rapunzel (Ecdysis), and adding some contemporary originals to the cauldron as well (Faux Fairy Tale, The Siren of Wailing Lake, and Becoming a Beast). Her protagonists are assertive, crafty, independent, and out for blood.

“Tonight I am at a ball. You probably have in mind the fable society has told you — a maiden goes to a dance where she falls in love with a handsome prince who will take her away from her miserable life of servitude. I’m afraid that is just a bedtime story, a wish for a better, happier world. This evening will not be about falling in love or escaping for a night. There is no fairy godmother or glass slipper in this story. I am the only one who is going to save myself.”

— from Husband by Midnight

The tales in this collection move through a variety of styles within the fairytale genre. Rosso opens her collection with the Sunday-night drive-in matinee stalker-flick rendition of Beauty and the Beast, titled Killing the Beast, where her “Belle” refuses to be devoured by her captors and takes her fate into her own hands. In Husband by Midnight, Cinderella speaks directly to her reader and lawyers herself a bulletproof marriage contract, playing her cards close to the chest in order to maintain her agency and avoid becoming merely a husband’s property (and she’ll show you how to do it, too!). The surrealist nightmare that is Ecdysis is perhaps my personal favorite of Rosso’s rewrites in this collection — Rapunzel’s hallucinatory escape from the tower where an Enchantress has been keeping her, selling her into sex-work.

Aside from Rosso’s retellings, she has also included a few originals. One strikingly beautiful tale, The Siren of Wailing Lake, is a heartbreaking, yet, empowering story of Celia, a woman who was drowned by her own father, and since her death has transformed into a mermaid who seeks revenge for her murder and for all of the other women who have suffered a similar fate.

While some of the stories in She is a Beast seem familiar on the surface, they are anything but traditional. They are deviant, subversive. They redefine the boundaries of genre while breathing new life into storytelling as an artform. Rosso’s inventions, too — her own contributions to the fairytale canon — fulfill our desires for illusion and fantasy while simultaneously refusing to conform to any of the archetypal constructs that reify the patriarchal infrastructure that underlies our society today. Like the mermaid Celia in The Siren of Wailing Lake, Rosso asserts her voice within the genre for herself and for women everywhere, to the benefit of us all — still children at heart, who deserve better heroines.

Angelo Colavita is a writer from Philadelphia, PA, where he serves as Founding Editor of Empty Set Press and Associate Editor at Occulum Journal. He is the author of two collections of poetry — Flowersonnets (ESP 2018), Heroines (ESP 2017) — with work appearing or forthcoming in the Operating System’s ExSpecPo series, Pigeon: A Radical Animal Reader vol. 2, Mookychick, Madcap Review, Prolit Magazine, Metatron, Dream Pop Journal, South Broadway Ghost Society, Luna Luna Magazine, Yes Poetry, Apiary Magazine, and elsewhere online and in print. His forthcoming epic poem, Nazareth, will be released by APEP Publications in 2020. For more information, please visit www.angelocolavita.com or follow him on Twitter @angeloremipsum and on Instagram @angelocolavita.