“The challenge of writing about human monsters is that you have to confront the ways in which they’re exactly like you are. Felker-Martin actually wrote about it herself for Autostraddle earlier this year, and this paragraph stuck with me:
I also wondered about what it must’ve been like for the author, who is trans, to really get in the headspace of Ramona, the TERF character whose perspective the book dips into with increasing frequency as the action and tension ramps up.
I learned a lot, I cringed a lot, I gasped a lot. But for me, Felker-Martin offers up a unique spin on the zombie genre, one I personally have never read before. I am a straight, white, cis woman, and I recognize that I can only truly, authentically speak to my opinion about the effectiveness of Manhunt as a horror novel, and there may be nuances that I’m missing. Overall, I really liked this book, blood and guts aside. (If you’re wondering which organs, take a closer look at the cover, el oh el.) And while it might seem like, at least at first glance, that the monsters in Manhunt are the oozing, bloodthirsty, infected feral men running rampant across the country, you don’t have to read too far in to get a sense that it’s women - non-zombified, human women - who are the real nightmares.Īs an introspective answer to some recent, controversial gender-based apocalypse stories that have failed to consider the existence of transgender and non-binary people, Manhunt introduces us to Beth and Fran, both trans, who spend their days traveling up and down the ravaged coast of New England while hunting rabid, feral men whose organs they harvest to ensure they'll never face the same fate. It’s best to just dive right in and immerse yourself in Felker-Martin’s bleak, brutal vision of the future.Īs seen in great works of horror on both the page and the screen, humanity often ends up being the real monster we need to be afraid of - see: films/TV series like Get Out, Alien, and District 9 books like The Troop, Patricia Wants to Cuddle, The Cabin at the End of the World. evil, to the rise of TERFs, to what it means to be a woman, to.
The second thing to keep in mind, is that there are so many thought-provoking ideas at play in this horror novel, from simple questions of morality and good vs. The first thing you should know about Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin is that it goes for your jugular from chapter one, with action so visceral right off the bat that it left me wondering how the author could possibly be able to keep up the pace as things wore on.
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