Photo courtesy of Tor Nightfire

Have you noticed that children nowadays often use physical injuries to express strong emotional reactions? Like, if you and I were running in the same circle, you might have heard enough variations of "This article applied 500 pounds of blunt force to the back of my skull" or "I wish that girl really broke The whole premise of "My Spine" has begun to become a cliché. Therefore, I think it is necessary to explain, when I said that Gretchen Felker-Martin’s upcoming doomsday horror novel Manhunt slipped a pair of stilettos between my third and fourth ribs, using some kind of female sledgehammer. Smashed my kneecap and killed me with a crossbow bolt to the end, I mean every damn word.

So, what is this thing? Broadly speaking, this is one of the "gender apocalyptic" stories that appear from time to time, sharing suspicious companies with companies like The Power and Y: The Last Man. Historically, this subtype has been hampered by the inevitable elegance of its author. It’s not that this premise is fundamentally wrong, but once you spend enough time to adjust your own gender, all these changes about "what if all men/women die/become evil", zero Considering the permeability of these categories to start looking for the best case is quaint, the worst case is a bit sinister. Seemingly rebutting this, Manhunt explored the horror of gender-based apocalypses from a clear transfemale perspective, and has therefore become one of the most distressing and creepy horror novels in recent memory.

Here, the end of the world appears in the form of a particularly annoying zombie virus, a kind of unconscious sexual violence cannibals that transform individuals with sufficiently high testosterone levels. Therefore, the main transfem actor of this book is forced to hunt wild men and synthesize estrogen for their corpses to avoid joining the slave tribe. Right now, this is a very terrible premise. Like all the best horror films, it requires existing fears—the fear of male predation and violence, the fear of losing hormones and seeing your body unformed—and the creeping, visceral supernatural Drag them to the surface in reality. The most influential examples (or at least the ones that have the most personal impact on me) are not even from the virus itself. Look, even though the savages are on the back cover, the true opponent of this story is a faction called the Maryland Women's Army. The Legion is a group of militant TERFs who used the end of the world to gain a position of social power, from where they can enforce the sanctity of biological women in the way they have always secretly wanted: indoctrination, riot gear, and death squads. It's hard to read. Witnessing the terrifying ideology of the real world, the deification of the police state and wishing you to die, this is not exactly an interesting experience. However, something about this book brought me back, no matter how many painful descriptions of transgender happened too close to home, I had to put it down overnight. There is an abnormal catharsis that you can only find in such works. One looks into your eyes and admits the anxiety that keeps you awake at night. One that doesn't talk nonsense when things are so bad, but still shows that people like you are working hard to make them better. Due to the lack of a better word, it is verified that it is better than any soft-colored queer™ expression squeezed out by the Disney/Netflix/Cartoon Network Industrial Complex. This is a kind of verification, and I didn't realize it until I really and really needed it.

Felker-Martin's writing is as harsh and sharp as the subject requires, which is very helpful. Her words are like scalpels and tweezers, peeling off the decent layers of calcification, revealing the raw flesh and screaming nerves underneath. These internals are not only visible in the vivid moments of the story, but also in the extensive brushstrokes of plot and character creation. Our protagonists suffer from unbearable details; their bodies collapse and oppose them because they suffer almost all the horror and insults the world offers, and when they manage to fight back, they are determinedly cruel. Although this may just be offensive without being careful (looking at you Garth Ennis), here, all the gore and gore are inseparably integrated into the fundamentally cute truth of these characters. The way they love, have sex, and hurt each other resonates with the messy, queer relationship that I often see in life but rarely seen in novels, only because the story is dedicated to addressing its ugly theme positively. It's so profound and final. I fell in love with Beth and Fran almost immediately, these two tough trans women, who were our first protagonists. When we met them for the first time, they were beaten in a mess. They seemed to survive by sheer inertia, but they were still able to joke and care about each other. Over time, I gradually fell in love with the other members of their dysfunctional family: Robbie, a long-term reclusive Transmass sharpshooter, and the maternal cis-doctor Indi who provided them with hormones. I even have a certain way for Ramona, a ruthless but (ultimate) confessional TERF, and the only POV we dabble in Legionnaires, although I should probably talk about that with my therapist. (Because, oh yes, this book is horny, and it's also attractive in almost as uncomfortable ways as they are.) I can go on, but with such complex emotional scar tissue established between these characters, it can be more Digging into any of their dynamics will only add a few incoherent sobbing and crazy gestures at the end of this review. 

In addition, I want you to have the opportunity to discover them yourself, because if you don’t know yet, Manhunt will provide my strongest recommendation. It's definitely not for everyone-it's cruel, it's frustrating, and it can take more than two pages to resolve all the necessary content warnings in 11-point font. But if you think you can tolerate it, if you want to watch a clever, tear-jerking queer thriller, it will make you mess, sticking to you for a long time may leave you with some deep kinks. I can't force this book into your hands.