F4 by Larissa Glasser

Formats: Print, Digital

Publisher: Eraser Head Press

Genre: Blood & Guts, Body Horror, Monster, Sci-Fi Horror

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Trans women, Bisexual women, Queer women

Takes Place in: North Atlantic Ocean

Content Warnings: Bullying, Drug Use/Abuse, Death,  Forced Captivity, Gore, Homophobia, Kidnapping, Mention of Medical Procedures, Police Harassment, Rape/Sexual Assault, Sexism, Slurs, Stalking, Suicide, Transphobia, Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Violence  (Highlight to view)


Blurb:

A cruise ship on the back of a sleeping kaiju. A transgender bartender trying to come terms with who she is. A rift in dimensions known as The Sway. A cruel captain. A storm of turmoil, insanity and magic is coming together and taking the ship deep into the unknown. What will Carol the bartender learn in this maddening non-place that changes bodies and minds alike into bizarre terrors? What is the sleeping monster who holds up the ship trying to tell her? What do Carol’s fractured sense of self and a community of internet trolls have to do with the sudden pull of The Sway?

Please note: This review was written before I was out as genderqueer. In the review I refer to myself as not being part of the trans/non-binary community. This inaccurate. 

The horror genre is not generally kind to trans-women, frequently depicting them as serial killers and/or sexual deviants. Hell, fiction in general doesn't treat trans people well, forcing them into a victim role and focusing on their angst and dysphoria. So you can imagine how unbelievably excited I was when I learned that Eraserhead Press was publishing a horror story about a bad ass trans woman who fights monsters and alt-right trolls. Even better, it was being written by a trans woman! Glasser is  a librarian from Boston which makes her five-hundred times cooler in my eyes (I love librarians, they're like keepers of secret knowledge and they know everything). The reviews for F4 have so far been unanimously positive, the premise sounded weird and awesome, and it promised representation rarely found in the horror genre. F4 was like everything I had wished for and I could not pre-order it fast enough.

Well, apparently whatever jinni decided to grant my wish for an awesome trans-lady horror story written by a trans person was one of those dick bag jinn who likes to pull that Monkey's Paw shit, because I haven't been this disappointed since I first saw Star Wars Episode One after months of hype.



I guess I'm just lucky the Djinn didn't give me $10,000 in pennies that fell from the sky and crushed me to death.

Carol, the main character of the story, is a trans-woman who works as a bartender on the Finasteride, a cruise ship built on the back of the F4. This name does not, in fact, come from one of those computer function keys that no one ever uses for anything (except maybe the F5 key), but instead refers to the last of four kaiju that mysteriously appeared on earth and fucked up a bunch of stuff. Okay, so far so good. Then, all of a sudden, everyone on board starts turning into eldritch abominations... and thus begins a confusing clusterfuck of unexplained randomness. The transformations may or may not have something to do with a dimensional rift called the Sway, which isn't mentioned prior to everything going to hell, is never fully explained, and may or may not be common knowledge in the book's world.  Carol's creepy boss and his even creepier buddy are behind everything, because they want to sail into the Sway, but their motivation is never explained beyond some vague lust for power. Well, if it works for Saturday morning cartoon villains I guess it's fine. There's also a wizard who lives in the Sway and can control the Kaiju, who we've also never heard of before and who also isn't really explained. Again, it's really unclear whether this is common knowledge or not, or if the Sway is actually just some giant, extra-dimensional plot hole and we're just expected to go with it. The weirdest part is that even though the wizard controls the kaiju, he isn't evil despite his giant beasts killing millions of people. One of them even destroyed New York City looking for Carol (why though!?!), but fuck all those victims, I guess? Why is no one horrified by all this? Oh, and apparently Carol's penis is some sort of magical flesh key or something, I don't even know. Maybe her penis' magic is why she gets erections constantly (and won't shut up about it), despite having had an orchidectomy. Usually, having your testicles removed or going on testosterone blockers causes penis-having folk to have very few spontaneous erections (and some stop getting erections all together) so it seems really odd that Carol keeps getting constant danger boners (which would be an awesome band name) but I'm hardly an expert, so whatever.

In addition to her bartending duties, Carol also makes sex videos on the side with her friend Chole, another transwoman whom she's slightly obsessed with. Carol's wait staff of trans women, or "lady dicks" as she calls them, also make extra cash "servicing" the passengers of the Finasteride. This is the part that made me feel really weird. Frequently when trans people appear in fiction, it's as some sort of sex worker, and they're being written by cis folk who have little understanding of, or respect for both trans women or sex workers. It's such a cliché that cops will actually harass trans women on the street because they assume they're prostitutes. So having the majority of the trans women in a story do some sort of sex work felt problematic, especially since most of the clients appeared to consider them a fetish rather than real people. It certainly doesn't help that Carol doesn't even seem to like doing web-cam work, and is only tolerating it because Chole pressured her into making porn. I enjoy naked people having sexy fun times as much as the next person, especially when those people are queer and/or non-binary, and one of the things that originally drew me to F4 was the promise of erotica with trans-ladies. But when the participants are being pressured, exploited, or fetishized, porn is just gross. F4 felt more like the later. The sex scenes aren't even arousing. One involves a toothless dude drooling in Carol's ass crack as she feels uncomfortable and wishes it were over. Ick. Chole also gets sexually assaulted by one of the kaiju's parasites in a really uncomfortable scene (which I think was supposed to be humorous?) and Carol does exactly jack and shit to help her friend. Maybe weird, unappealing sex is a staple of bizarro fiction, but trans women are disrespected enough in the porn industry, I was really hoping it wouldn't happen here too.


F4 isn't like the terrible, transphobic porn you might find online, but it's not particularly good erotica either

My confusion regarding the story line made it difficult to focus on the book (as did the frequent mention of dicks), and I probably would've given up on it completely if not for part two, the saving grace of F4. Part two is proof that Glasser really is a talented author. Instead of getting a bunch of random nonsense throw at us we get an intriguing and suspenseful, but straight forward story of Carol's life prior to the Finasteride. Her character suddenly feels relatable. She's dating a loser she can't seem to dump, living in the middle of nowhere, and trying to figure out what to do with her life. Carol witnesses a murder, and tries to do the right thing by reporting it to the cops. But since no good deed goes unpunished, she finds herself in the media spot light after becoming a key witness in the murder case, and becomes a victim of an online hate campaign by a bunch of transphobic trolls. Part 2 is great! It's intriguing, suspenseful, we finally get some explanations about what's going on, and of course Glasser had to go and ruin it by making part 3 even more random and confusing. This just made me hate the rest of the book even more because I now knew I could've been enjoying a well-written story about a trans woman vs. a bunch of internet trolls, and dealing with the dilemma of being punished for doing the right thing. But instead I had to put up with awkward sex, magical girl dicks, and a series of loosely connected plot holes. So I became bitter and sulkily rushed through the third part of the story, desperate to find some of the magic from Part 2. The only thing that redeemed part 3 was Carol killing the two entitled dudebros who fucked everyone over for more power, one of whom was the leader of the internet trolls who ruined her life. That was immensely satisfying.

So yeah, I really didn't like this book. Of course, I'm not trans (well, I am, but I wasn't out when I first wrote this), so it's possible my privilege was preventing me from recognizing the appeal of F4. All the reviews I had read online were overwhelming positive, so what was I missing? Was it just not intended for me? So I went to my friend, Ashley Rogers (who you may remember from the Oddity post), for help. I figured since she's an author herself, a trans sensitivity reader, and a trans rights activist she'd be able to offer some valuable insight. Although Ashley is currently busy working on SCOWL: Fight for your Rights, a subversive, queer-focused, stage combat piece (I designed the logo so I have to shamelessly pimp the project), she was kind enough to take some time out of her busy schedule to share her opinion with me. I also asked her to explain what Glasser meant when she kept talking about "hatching eggs", but Ashley didn't know either, nor did any of the other trans and non-binary people I asked, and I eventually had to resort to Reddit and Urban Dictionary.



It turns out "eggs" refer to closeted trans folk still struggling with their identity who have not yet come into their own.

Ashley had the following to say:

First a disclaimer: Trans/n-b folk can and should be able to tell whatever stories we want.  I love bizarre and spooky material, and I want trans folk to succeed, and regardless of my feelings on this novel I am excited to see more from Larissa Glasser...
Buuuuuuuut...

My main criticism is that the piece doesn't seem to know what it wants or who it's written for. F4 intends to shock (evidenced by the material referenced in the piece such as Cannibal Holocaust and The Human Centipede) but it falls short of living up to those expectations.  We don't live in the uncomfortable moments and grotesque situations long enough to care.  At most we're left with a sense of "ok... That's fucked up," but then we move on to something else before we have a chance to feel unsettled.

Part two feels like a completely different (and subjectively better) novel entirely.  I was gripped by the backstory and it had a great flow, and some of the concepts are really cool (Hell, it's about turning a Kaiju into a cruise liner!!), but as a trans woman I couldn't help but be bored by how often Carol popped a boner in the face of danger.  One of the positive critiques I've seen from other trans women is that it's a story that isn't about a trans character who's sad, angry, and depressed about surgical transition/dysphoria but the way the author focuses on Carol's anatomy and overly sexual descriptions rather than creating the atmosphere distracts from the story and intriguingly bizarre concept of the piece in the same way these other pieces focus on the tragedy porn that gets written about our physical transition struggles.  If this book was all part two I would be writing a very different statement but... I wish it were either more shocking in execution or more approachable in material, but as it stands it sits in limbo of both.

I won't lie, I feel genuinely guilty about not liking F4. I mean, everyone else loves it, and I want to be supportive of trans and non-binary folk in a cis-centric genre, but I just could not enjoy the story. I had no idea what was going on half the time, a lot of it just seemed to be weird for the sake of weirdness and contributed nothing to the story, and, the sex scenes felt more gross and exploitative than sexy and empowering. I liked the ideas behind F4, but the execution left a lot to be desired. Glasser clearly has talent as a writer, as is evident from part 2 of the story, so maybe I just don't like bizzaro horror, I don't know.  At the very least I can say it's like nothing I've ever read before. In the mean time, I'm going to stick to reading Nerve Endings when I'm in the mood for some well written trans erotica.