Manhunt

by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Ebook, 2022

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

21-Poetry & Fiction

Publication

Tor Nightfire (2022), 293 pages

Description

"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"--

Media reviews

Interzone Digital

Manhunt keeps its trans characters at the centre of the narrative. It is their actions, their desires, their decisions that power the plot; and it is them we ultimately care about. That alone makes this book stand out among all other gendercide novels I have read (and I have read a lot of them).

But it is Felker-Martin’s attention to the actual mechanisms of the patriarchy, including how supporters of patriarchal power – like Teach – would respond to any threat to that power which makes this book essential reading.

Show Less

— 2 more

Los Angeles Review of Books

Greater than any achievement in its plot is Manhunt’s ability to dance along the boundaries between the mind and the body, internal experience and outside world, and our senses of pleasure and disgust.

National Public Radio (NPR)

Disgustingly rendered and brilliantly imagined, Manhunt was gripping as much as it was repulsive. It's rare to read a horror novel that truly tests my limits in a (mostly) pleasurable way — and Manhunt delivers. It's a challenge, and one I hope more readers take.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Verkruissen

Ok, here it goes. This book was truly unlike anything I've ever read. I mean, the cover gives you a pretty good idea about how this is gonna go. I've always been a fan of apocalyptic stories and this one had an unusual twist by it's characters being trans.
Trigger warning: This book involves rape,

cannibalism, gore, and trans violence.
The plot in itself was interesting. Five years after the testosterone in men causes them to become basically wild, raping, cannibalizing creatures; the only survivors are women and trans men and women who have been on hormones to help them transition. They survive by hunting down the feral men and "harvest" their testicles and livers to process estrogen. They also simply eat the items if there is no time to refine it. Or, as one scene described, how to tilt the pan so the balls were evenly coated with butter while sautéing them. (Just no.)
So, the cis-women are the "bad guys" in this story, they hunt down trans people and crucify them as examples of traitors to their genders. It's really just crazy.
All in all, a good plot, interesting ideas, but it was really hard to find a person to root for, they all had serious flaws which made them very hard to relate to.

Show Less

4 more

LibraryThing member rivkat

Is there a non-transphobic version of “all the men/XYs die”? This book sets out to offer that, though there is plenty of transphobia expressed within the narrative, as TERFs try to eradicate trans women as a biological threat. As with the X-Men-as-analogue-to-LGBTQ+ people, where many mutants

are dangerous in unusual ways to others, the book’s virus means that anyone who naturally produces a significant amount of testosterone is in fact in danger of becoming a cannibalistic monster (a Man) who will rape to death anyone it hasn’t eaten first. That means that XXs with PCOS also turn, and pregnancy testosterone fluctuations can also mean a death sentence (in a sign about how much body horror there is in the book, the babies eating their ways out of the uterus are not the grossest things described). Trans women survive by consuming estrogen, which post-collapse-of-society is often most easily achieved by killing Men and eating their testicles, one source of the titular Manhunt. Cis men survive, if they do, by also consuming estrogen and, in TERF territory, by being castrated. The main characters are two trans women, a trans man they join up with under dangerous circumstances, the cis doctor whose skills make her valuable in the new order, and a cis woman who rises in the TERF army despite or because of her desire for non-cis sex. I found the narrative too crapsack world for my tastes, though not particularly implausible. Class oppression manages to survive at least some period beyond the death of 90% of people, and along with the horrors inflicted by Men, there is additional torture, rape, and forced medical experimentation. There was something striking about the fact that, on the East Coast at least, the majority of survivors appeared to be cityfolk, apparently more able to band together against Men than rural dwellers.

Show Less

LibraryThing member kylekatz

2022. A virus has turned all the men into zombies who eat women and animals. I saw this called “splattercore” somewhere. It is extremely gory and disgusting. After the plague there’s a TERF army going after trans femmes, ostensibly because they could catch the plague, if they still had testes

and couldn’t get estrogen. Really just an excuse to hunt them down. A few trans people and allies band together and a massive battle ensues. Well to be more accurate, it’s about a thousand ravenous, slavering men the TERFS have led to the trans peoples’ fort, and 60 TERFS, against about 30 trans people in a fort. The TERFS also have a battleship offshore, but the trans people have people onboard who sink her before she does too much damage. Remarkably the TERFS don’t win, but it feels like they may as well have. One of my favorite characters, Fran, gets killed in the battle. There’s one trans masculine character, Robbie, fighting with the trans people. He was with Fran for a while, but they broke up. After the battle he decides to try to get to New Mexico to find his father’s family. The ending is bleak. You really don’t know how anytran is going to survive the hellscape that the country has become. The action takes place between Boston and southern Maine, but the TERFS hold an area all the way from Boston to Maryland, at least. There’s lots of t4t sex and transfemme/lesbian sex. It was way more sex and gore than I like. But it was refreshing to have so much trans variety in one book. It was really funny. At one point they tell how J. K. Rowling had holed up with a bunch of TERFS in her castle and they’d locked up all their men and boys in the dungeon or something, but they got out somehow and ate everyone. Basically I loved the book in spite of the gore and the bleak unrelenting hellscape. Definitely not for everyone.

Show Less

LibraryThing member JenelleB

I'm not sure how I feel. Gore is not a problem for me. Way too into horror for that. Sex doesn't bother me unless it's superfluous. A lot of the sex felt superfluous in this one. Though at the same time it's nice that it wasn't cis/het/mono normative. It was a bit on the nose in terms of metaphors,

etc, but it was an engaging read.

Show Less

LibraryThing member mojomomma

This book is classified as horror, but it tries too hard to be simply shocking and disgusting. A virus has turned all men into animals who hunt women. Women try to keep the upper hand in this new society, but become militant. Most of the main characters in this tale are transwomen, some were in the

process of transitioning when the virus happened. They are stuck between genders, hoping to hide from the cis-women and stay uneaten by the men. They survive by hunting men and eating their testicles and adrenal glands. How this helps them, I'm never quite sure. Wouldn't that expose them to testosterone and make them MORE attractive to the virus that affects men? the whole premise didn't make sense. Don't read this book while you are eating yoru breakfast!

Show Less

Fewer