Manhunt

... a post-apocalyptic horror novel telling a new tale, from a new voice, in a familiar setting, for a spot on the shelf next to the classics ... Felker-Martin gives everyone a voice and an experience. This does make the scope of Manhunt feel a bit daunting in size with its huge cast of characters to keep track of, but that’s something many readers come prepared to do for this genre given all the door-stopper, epic novels that have come before ... The most difficult thing about investing in the characters of Manhunt is all the fucking emotional wreckage. These are not two-dimensional, cardboard cutouts of fictional people running around playing apocalyptic warfare, these are complex, flesh and blood individuals with strong, dynamic character traits, big personalities, and raw emotions. They run full-on into one another with all their psychological trauma and form these complicated relationships based on attraction, survival, and need. It is unabashedly queer, explicit, greasy, violent, and sensual. *flailing hands and gesturing* all of these things, all at the same time ... It’s tough to go through some of the things these characters end up doing to one another but there are some shining moments of feel-good hope and humanity, softened by humor; sprinkled with sarcasm. It’s a lot of fun and it’s also very dark ... Gretchen Felker-Martin clearly has a lot to say. There seems to be a countless cast of colorful characters just waiting to make their mark on our horror-fiction-loving hearts with more strange and wonderful stories to tell ... This is a debut that literally throws open the door and announces its arrival by making sure the room knows its intentions to stay. Manhunt is what the future of this genre looks like. Take note.

... masterful ... an incredible book. I haven’t read a book this close to the bone in a long time. It’s an edge-of-your-seat, gripping account of a world overrun by TERFs as they seek to eradicate trans women ... The novel is told in many strands, often producing a whiplash pacing that works best during battle ... As grim as it sounds, it’s an incredibly acerbic and witty read, going down with equal parts tenderness and brutality ... tackles difficult subjects with vision ... The interplay of cis power and trans vulnerability is never drawn in stark shades, instead both are capable of great harm and subversive acts of kindness.

Felker-Martin’s horror novel cunningly weaves trans determinism, war, and trauma together in an effort to locate joy, empathy, and pleasure in a world on fire ... Felker-Martin’s critical eye manifests gleefully in her fiction as she dares you to turn away but compels you to keep looking ... Through gruesome bodily description, sharp emotional intuition, and searing sociopolitical criticism, Manhunt is horrifying, at times titillating, and even hilarious — but most importantly, it thrills at every turn. The prose and pacing embody the slow drawback of a bow thrown into release with the shot of an arrow, never missing its target; the building tension of being edged to the pleasure of an orgasm. It not only displays a mastery of horror’s conventions, but it also tears open the rich (and ripe) possibilities of trans horror for the world to see. In a population for whom the remaking of the body and threat of violence is quotidian, the bar for what can be considered scary and thrilling is particularly high, but Manhunt clears it while being hotter than any erotic novel in the post–Fifty Shades landscape and packing in more glittering nature descriptions than Walden ... The novel establishes a lexicon of its own, blended smirkingly with that of the generation of trans women at its center ... The novel’s pervasive sense of terror is almost a relief in its sureness: no longer are trans women looking in the eyes of passersby anticipating whether an average day might turn deadly, but rather, they can all but count on any interaction being a fight to the death ... 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. The narration hovers in the air of omniscience, brushing up against the thought stream of one character before switching to the another. Indi navigates the physical necessities of her size in the eye of pity and disgust ... out of an increasingly devastating reality, Felker-Martin has concocted a world that is infinitely scarier, darker, and bloodier than you can imagine, but still, there is a sliver of hope.