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Sunday, March 6, 2022

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin


Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Tor Nightfire

Genre: Apocalypse/Disaster, Monster

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Trans author and characters, queer characters, Native character

Takes Place in: North Eastern US

Content Warnings: Animal Death, Body Shaming, Cannibalism,  Child Death, Childbirth, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Eating Disorder, Forced Captivity, Gore, Illness, Kidnapping, Medical Procedures, Oppression, Rape/Sexual Assault, Self-Harm, Slurs, Torture, Transphobia, Verbal/Emotional Abuse,  Violence (Highlight to view)

Blurb:
Y: The Last Man meets The Girl With All the Gifts in Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, an explosive post-apocalyptic novel that follows trans women and men on a grotesque journey of survival.

Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they'll never face the same fate.

Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren't safe.

After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics―all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.

Manhunt is a timely, powerful response to every gender-based apocalypse story that failed to consider the existence of transgender and non-binary people, from a powerful new voice in horror.


I received this product for free in return for providing an honest and unbiased review. I received no other compensation. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Have you ever wondered what happens to trans people in sex-based apocalypses like those in Y: The Last Man or Ōoku: The Inner Chambers? Gretchen Felker-Martin sets out to answer exactly that in her post-apocalypse splatterpunk novel Manhunt.

The T-rex virus transforms anyone with high levels of testosterone—mostly cis-men—into cannibalistic, sex-crazed monsters. Emboldened by the end of the world, a group of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical “feminists”) have formed their own militia where they hunt and kill any trans women they find. It may seem like a group of militant TERFs is an exaggeration, but it feels like less of a stretch when you consider there’s already a high rate of violence against trans people. In 2021 alone, at least 56 trans and gender non-conforming people were murdered in the US. Transphobic hate crimes have quadrupled over the last five years in the UK. These fake feminists are also more fascist adjacent than they’d like to admit. As Judith Butler accurately pointed out, TERFs “have allied with rightwing attacks on gender” and “The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So, the TERFs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism.” TERFs Lily Cade and Bev Jo Von Dohre have even called for the death of trans women. The fact that trans women in Manhunt can transform into monsters if they don’t have access to anti-androgen medication gives the TERFs exactly the excuse they’ve been waiting for to go from hateful rhetoric to actually destroying that which they hate most (never mind that cis-women with PCOS or congenital adrenal hyperplasia can also transform into feral beasts).

Not only do trans women have to avoid getting killed by the monstrous men, but also running into the militant TERFs who have seized control of most of the northeast. Fran and Beth are two such transwomen trying to survive in the new world, catching feral men and harvesting their testicles for their friend Indy to extract estradiol from. After running afoul of a militant group of TERFs and almost being killed by men, Fran and Beth meet a sharp-shooting trans man named Robbie, who they take on their journey with them. The trio return to Indy’s house with their testicle trophies where they learn she’s been offered a job by a spoiled rich girl who controls a luxurious bunker. But the promises of comfort the bunker offers may hide a deadly truth.

While I personally enjoyed this book, it won’t be for everyone. It is splatterpunk, after all. That means there’s lots of brutal violence (including a cis woman having her uterus cut out of her), gross content (testicle eating), and graphic sex. Everyone in Manhunt is super horny, sometimes at wildly inappropriate times, so Beth, Fran, Indy, and Robbie do a lot of fucking. The sex is hot, sometimes gross, and other times both hot and gross, much like real sex. It was nice to have sex scenes centered around trans pleasure rather than the cis-male gaze. Of course, the graphic description of genitalia might be triggering for some people who experience gender dysphoria, so be aware of that. Speaking of hot sex, a captain in the TERF army named Ramona is sleeping with a non-binary prostitute named Feather. One reviewer claimed this is unrealistic but I have to disagree. A lot of chasers are happy to sleep with trans people but won’t do anything to defend their rights or even stand up for them. Too many people with trans partners see their relationship as a shameful secret to be kept, and Ramona is no different. She’s too much of a coward to do the right thing and just goes along with the TERF army because it’s what’s easy.

Splatterpunk is very hit or miss for me, as many extreme horror books can cross over into misogynistic violence. Manhunt manages to avoid this trap, even though most of the book’s violence is against women (as all the characters, aside from Robbie, are women). Perhaps because it’s other women committing the violence, but I didn’t get that gross feeling I usually do when reading splatterpunk authored by cis men. Even the sexual assault scene didn’t feel gratuitous and was handled well. I also loved how flawed the protagonists are. Some people mistakenly assume LGBTQIA+ characters need to be perfect for it to be considered a “good” portrayal. I believe realistic is preferable to perfect, and I like my queer characters to have character flaws who sometimes do and say problematic things. Both Beth and Fran feel very human. Beth is reckless and insecure; Fran has both passing and class privilege and can sometimes be selfish. Neither of them are bad people, just realistically flawed.

My only complaint about the book (and granted, it’s minor) is that there are so many descriptions of Indi’s fat body. The way she’s described isn’t quite fatphobic, but it did make me feel uncomfortable that there was so much focus on it. I can understand that Indy is dealing with a lot of internalized fatphobia and insecurity, so it makes sense that her character would spend a lot of time focusing on her size and the limitations that come with it. When the story is told from a third-person point of view, there’s no reason for Indy’s weight to be described in such detail, especially since no one else’s body gets that much description or scrutiny. At least she’s never described as gross or unattractive, and Indi even gets to be sexually desirable, which is rare for fat characters outside of fetish porn. It was refreshing to see fat people having passionate sex scenes just like their skinny counterparts. Like I said, it’s a minor complaint and could absolutely be my own hypersensitivity.

Reading this book is like having your brain put in a blender. It's wild, gross, horny, disgusting, tragic, and hilarious all whipped together into an extreme horror smoothie. In other words, I LOVED it. You have to be at least somewhat familiar with trans culture to fully appreciate the story, which I thought was awesome. There's also just something extremely satisfying about trans women killing fascist TERFs: not something I'd advocate in real life, but it's fun and cathartic in fiction. Unsurprisingly, this made a bunch of real-life TERFs very angry. They didn’t like being portrayed as bigoted assholes just because of their bigoted asshole-ish behavior and tried to review bomb Manhunt…which should just make you want to read it more.