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. |
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.