Title: F4
Author: Larissa Glasser
Publisher: Eraserhead Press
Length: 150 Pages
Category: Horror
At a Glance: I wouldn’t go so far as to say F4 is a must-read for Horror fans. When I say it defies conventions, I mean that, fervently, but if you’re looking for a story set in a world that’s a lot off kilter, with a different sort of lead up to its different sort of happy ending, F4 delivers.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: A cruise ship on the back of a sleeping kaiju. A transgender bartender trying to come terms with who she is. A rift in dimensions known as The Sway. A cruel captain. A storm of turmoil, insanity and magic is coming together and taking the ship deep into the unknown. What will Carol the bartender learn in this maddening non-place that changes bodies and minds alike into bizarre terrors? What is the sleeping monster who holds up the ship trying to tell her? What do Carol’s fractured sense of self and a community of internet trolls have to do with the sudden pull of The Sway?
Review: The Horror genre is my first love—at least where reading is concerned—and since February is Women in Horror month, and I discovered this short novel on a list of recommended reads, what better way to kill two birds with one stone than to dig into Larissa Glasser’s F4, a story that doesn’t strictly adhere to genre modes (there’s enough here to classify it as SciFi/Dystopian Fantasy, and maybe even a little tentacle porn too, along with some dark, really dark comedy), but the motifs are present and accounted for, and let me tell you, this book had me trippin’ balls. Or, whatever the equivalent is of reading a story that makes you feel like you’re hallucinating in a ‘Whaaaat just happened?!’ kind of way. And that cover…how could I resist knowing the secrets it held?
F4 is an Own Voices story, and that’s absolutely imperative here. If Glasser weren’t a transgender woman I’d have set this book aside, because there are head on confrontations with her protagonist’s body and the dysphoria Carol Stratham experiences through this down-the-rabbit-hole-on-acid adventure that only an author with intimate knowledge could have written. Glasser not only confronts Carol’s thoughts and emotions, but she bare knuckle brawls with them, and then, in the ultimate power move, Glasser gives Carol the agency to level up on her terms. She is the key, in literal and figurative ways.
In addition, the story confronts unchecked capitalism, the cis-gender patriarchy, and cis-gender institutions, in general (listen, if you can’t be introduced to a character called Old Navy shirt and not only know exactly what she looks like, but also find that a little humorous…), and does so on the back of a giant monster of a cruise ship. Like, literally, a monster. You’ve heard of the World Turtle? Forget it. The Fury-beasts are Godzilla meets Megalon meets Rodan (though some sound a little cuter) on steroids that have been created and let loose to destroy cities. The Fourth Fury (F4 for short), known as The Finasteride (google it), is repurposed as a cruise ship, of all things, thanks to the opportunistic bent of a corporation known as Regalia, and an unnamed drug which subdues the beast into servitude (there is a metaphor in there, I’m certain). And Sin City has nothing on the Finasteride. It’s a good thing what happened there didn’t stay altogether there, though, or Carol wouldn’t have discovered the power of her Self.
Beyond all of that, we are offered the literal and metaphorical articulations about what it means to be a transgender woman, and the vigilance and adversity Carol faces for being who she is, especially when a group of online haters get involved. There is a point where the story regresses to pre-cruise ship chaos, which offers readers a more intimate insight into Carol and her truths; in the process of engendering this relationship between character and reader, it brings the adrenaline rush of the story’s beginning down to a slow simmer and introduces a more sensitive tone to the telling before again delivering the mayhem to its completion.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say F4 is a must-read for Horror fans. When I say it defies conventions, I mean that, fervently, all the way down to the editing. Who needs proper grammar and verb tense agreement, anyway? In the world Glasser writes about, those things don’t matter. All that matters is that the heroines rise and then they prevail. If you’re looking for a story set in a world that’s a lot off kilter, with a different sort of lead up to its different sort of happy ending, F4 delivers.
You can buy F4 here:
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