Manhunt

Grotesque queer horror of the most beautiful and trashy variety. It is so rare to find something that so bluntly captures the trans experience, trans survival, love and gore wrapped in a scrapnel coated blanket. It is uncompromising, at times bordering on cruel, the accumulation of a thousand daily tragedies spilling out over a ceaseless apocalypse.

Within that pain are the pockets of hope that sustain us. The relationships and messy connections and bitter loyalty of communities continually rebuilding themselves because nobody else is going to save them. It is an uncertain future, but a future all the same.

why was there genitalia on every page 😭😭😭😭 

Felker-Martin does pulp-y action and violence really well. She also does deeply moving, intense feelings about sex (and gender!) well. The shifts between the two things tonally weren't enjoyable for me--though perhaps that was part of the point? It reminded me in a way of Lovecraft Country, mixing real-world horror and pulp-y horror, but I was left wanting a bit more cohesion between the two.

Still, this was a fun and brutal read, alternatively, and I look forward to reading her next book.

This book is a brutally violent, grotesque, and shocking horror novel that brilliantly literalizes the discourse around trans rights. The polite violence of the real world is replaced by graphic, visceral action that forces you to confront what it feels like to be demonized and targeted by a small group of hateful bigots while “allies” watch on and let it happen.

I think too many people dismiss this as a book written for shock value. Yes it wants to shock you, but none of the violence, rape, gore, or sex is without purpose. It wants you to feel uncomfortable. It wants you to confront real, human bodies. It wants you to feel outraged, resentful, scared, bitter, jealous, angry, sad, hopeful—all the emotions that make up so much of the trans experience living in a world that tolerates us, but rarely defends us.

Like any good story, the literal events of the plot are just a vector for those feelings, and as over the top as those events can be, Gretchen's engaging prose and fully-realized characters keep you grounded in the human experience throughout, and all the confusing, ugly, and beautiful baggage that comes with it.

All that said, it is a shocking, violent horror story. As effectively I think it uses that format to convey the struggles of the trans experience, if that's not your genre then this book probably isn't for you.


As an aside to those who think this book hates women: I think it's pretty obvious that it doesn't. There are several cis women among the protagonists, and while it has plenty of criticism to go around, the only people the book clearly hates are the TERFs. If those are the only characters who count as real women to you, and you find yourself offended on behalf of the fascist order executing people in the street maybe you need to have a sit down and think about that.

UPDATE:
2.5 stars, rounded up. For my full review, listen to the 2024 Secret Santa episode of the Shit We've Read podcast here.
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Read for the Shit We've Read podcast Secret Santa Special. Rating and link to episode to come later.

+2 star for: BETH AND ROBBIE EACH UGH MY BABYS! by far my favorite perspectives to read from SO happy they made it to the end! in my opinion they were the most interesting and full fleshed out characters and as much as fran annoyed me (ENDLESSLY) i loved reading their interactions with her. so well done wow.

+1 star for: the writing??? god so gory and so visceral i just couldn't put it down!!! the type of story that just infects your everyday thoughts. so so so good

+1 star for: teach and beth's final SCENE UGH. it coming full circle from the beginning was so unbelievable satisfying i read the whole thing with a morbid grin on my face. beth is one bad ass mother fucker!!!

+1 star for: “it's just a way to keep from being drawn and quartered by the Knights of J. K. Rowling” I SCREAMED

-1 star for: the amount of side characters!! rarely have i come across a book where i feel there were too many extras. i even liked a lot of them but wow i was just astonished by how many new people were introduced each chapter. by the end i felt i couldn't really care about anyone other than the main six (beth, robbie, fran, indi, ramona and teach) and it's the one thing keeping me from giving this a five star. too often i had to search up people because i had no idea if they had shown up before. reading this book as a physical copy would have made this even more insufferable.

Wasn't sure about it in the beginning, but I'm glad I stuck with it!

Incredibly good, compulsively readable. Gory, scary fun, it was a pleasure and a privilege to be in the thoughts and hearts of such a fully realized, finely wrought group of characters. I found myself connecting with each of them, even if I hated them, because Felker-Martin does such a good job of bringing their specific stories to life. TW for everything; I had to stop reading a few times for violence and hate speech. This book is great, and it could be a tough hang. I'll be thinking about it for a long time, and I am already guessing I'll reread it.

This was tough. I want to read transfemme horror, and I want to read transmisogynists getting it like they deserve. I want to read splatterpunk and shock horror, body horror and violence so intimate that it makes me want to climb out of my skin and shower while I put my shell in the wash. I read those genres indivually and love them.

And yet. I struggled with this. It's brutal and violent- but I've read worse. It's a little corny and overwrought- but I've read worse. It pivots between POVs of the good folks and the irredeemably-evil-but-well-rounded-and-human evil- and I've read both better and worse.

I liked it, I think. I won't read it again. It kind of sucks to read this sort of bigoted violent apocalypse and see edges of reality. It made me sick, but not in a thrilling way. It made me have to put the book down. That's a triumph, for sure. And yet I don't feel good.

I enjoyed the prose during the zombie body horror stuff. I enjoyed the (gratuitous and non-gratuitous) sex. I enjoyed the zombie apocalypse world-building. I enjoyed the community themes. I hated the TERFs, both in the way I was supposed to and I think in ways I wasn't supposed to. I wish Ramona's chapters weren't so long, though I think Ramona is well-written. I'm not sure. I'll leave this review for now.

This book started and ended strong, but the middle was hard to get through for me.
I probably would have enjoyed it more if there had been less POV characters and perhaps if we had spent less time with Fran which I found rather insufferable and deeply unlikeable.
Sex seemed to replace any kind of relationship building, I can understand where the author is coming from with that, a lot of us do have a hard time differentiating between sex and intimacy, but the end result, for me, was that the relationships all felt unearned, shallow and adolescent. That aspect could have been interesting if it hadn't been the same for every single character.
There is a lot of hate and even more self-hate in this book, a lot of the characters do not like themselves not one bit, so it's a bleak reading experience no matter who you are (fat, trans and pretty, trans and not pretty, soft, tattooed...), I think that was part of the point Gretchen was trying to make (there can be no utopia because we hate ourselves as much if not more than others hate us) but yeah check trigger warnings before you read this cause it pulls no punches.
I wanted to love this book and I'm really bummed that I just didn't.

(2.5 rounded up)

As someone who reads almost exclusively horror, splatter, and transgressive LGBT fiction, hates TERFs and fascists, and wanted more than anything to be able to write a 5-star ‘fuck you review-bombing transphobe shitheels' review, I came into this book ready to love whatever it presented me with.

I didn't, and I don't get to write that review now :(.

I don't really like writing bad reviews so I'm not gonna say too much, but I did read Felker-Martin's novella ‘Dreadnought' last year and loved it. I didn't review it, but one of the aspects I remember feeling very strongly about was her amazingly efficient use of language in that book. She painted these gorgeous fleshed out scenes with perfectly economical word choice and phrasing. Lush movements and environments sprung out fully formed from a handful of words. It really impressed me. This book is the literal opposite of that and I found it super frustrating. There is about as much story in this as there is in ‘Dreadnought' but this is 200 pages longer. It feels so painfully padded out.

Hidden inside the stuff I hated about this book are some moments of tremendous genius and achievement. There's a chapter near the middle that I think might be my favorite chapter of anything I've read this year. There is such deep pathos and empathy and pain and instruction about the trans experience and body dysmorphia and mental illness and found family and loss and longing and lost futures and ahhhh it is so goddamn brilliant. It's frustrating that it's so deeply sandwiched between uninspired nothingness..

That said, fuck you review bombing terfs, good job Gretchen in triggering all these incel religious fruitcake douchenozzles and I'll probably like the next one more.

It's fine. Too long. I can see why some people might genuinely be thrilled that this was published.

This one was pretty challenging in some ways for me, as a straight, cis man—not because the cis men have become zombies, but because the life experiences I was reading about were vastly different from my own, and in some ways, unfamiliar or new to me and in others, just hard to hear about because I know how real some of that trauma etc is. The characters and the plot were novel and entertaining. I rooted for the protagonists and enjoyed their victories. I also appreciated some of the winks—I think some of the characters traveled through Derry, Maine (? maybe I misheard, listening on audiobook), and the terfs' warship was named the Galbraith, an obvious nod to JKR's pseudonym which I understand itself is a nod to a historical transphobe of some kind?

The narrator mispronounced Worcester, which is basically a crime for a book set in New England.