LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD SERIES
Equally significant is the series around Little Red Riding Hood, which has grown over the years. I have written about this work on several occasions: it lends itself to multiple readings. It is a contemporary version of a fairy tale in post-Freudian times when no one believes in the possibility of such delicate innocence. Mondongo's narrative chooses to generate images in various directions, like threads of discourse, maintaining the characters but not necessarily the narrative cores of the tale, as if to link the world in a whole that is hurried and skeptical. There is palpable erotic tension in the relationship between the wolf and the girl, and there is also a real paternal affection in which we try to believe but ultimately cannot. It is more of a desperate prelude, the tension of trying to keep things at bay. The wolf is lurking, and when a whole avalanche of Little Red Riding Hoods appears on the bridge, they all seem like girls on their way to the gallows.

The playful alteration of our accepted forms of discourse and understanding, characteristic of much of Mondongo's work, creates situations in which the play of irony as structure disrupts the content. Mondongo knows, asserts, intuits, or simply wonders if contemporary life might not be an incipient form of brain damage or the vulgar consequences of an uncontrolled, blind disease. What this series proposes is not so much a visual interpretation but an imaginative one. I recall something that Jerome Klinkowitz wrote about Donald Barthelme, an author I have often associated with Mondongo's work. Klinkowitz suggests that the images or vignettes that form a novel (or, in this case, a pictorial series) are “not so much conventional arguments in the dialectic of form, but rather imaginative volcanoes, radical measures to salvage certain experiences that might otherwise erode without the loss of our traditional standards.” In this sense, he [Barthelme] is counter-revolutionary, as he opposes the new language of technology and manipulation with the defense of interests and imagination that seem old-fashioned. In a new world, old values must be expressed in a new form. In inconsequential and irrational times, Barthelme’s forms reestablish the values of imagination: the rescue is accomplished with the finest attention to art.
Obviously, it is difficult to pinpoint what these “values of imagination” are, but in the case of Mondongo, they are partly psychological and partly sociocultural. His version of Little Red Riding Hood is narrated by one of the protagonists, both an omniscient narrator and a tacit subject. One of the problems of our world is the attempt to imagine something better than the text in which we are included. I suspect we are all waiting for rescue. We all have to face...
—Kevin Power, 2010