Review: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Title: Manhunt

Author: Gretchen Felker-Martin

Length: 293 Pages

Category: Horror

Rating: 4 Stars

At a Glance: Manhunt is quite possibly the darkest, bleakest horror novel I’ve ever read. It’s a book without a clear-cut hero, which is something unto itself, and, if you look close enough, there’s something in it to offend everyone. Gretchen Felker-Martin is relentless, a fierce storyteller, and this book pulls none of its punches.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: 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.

Review: Hemingway famously said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

If that were so, Manhunt would be the result. This book is bloody, it’s brutal, it provokes and evokes, it inflames and impresses. There’s very little about this story that isn’t hard-edged, and even, I would say, offensive. It cuts like a shiv to the tenderest places. It’s vividly harrowing, utterly blunt, and is, at once, a vital portrait of transgender empowerment. Gretchen Felker-Martin opened a rich vein of on-page warfare in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where humans are both predator and prey. Where testosterone has mutated into a zombie-creating hormone. In short, cisgender men are bloodthirsty, monstrous, murderous rapists and no one is safe. Not even the Queen of TERFs.

If you’ve ever been tempted to say “But not all…”, then this book isn’t for you. If you’re easily offended, then this book is not for you. If body horror and rape are triggers, then this book is not for you. Cis women are not the heroes. Cis men are slathering beasts who are hunted for their balls and kidneys because they’re a good source of estrogen. It’s a story of persistence. But some will also die in their fight to survive.

I love a good horror novel. Manhunt is one. It’s quite possibly the darkest, bleakest horror novel I’ve ever read. It’s a book without a clear-cut hero, which is something unto itself. Everything is fucked up beyond all recognition, and yet it’s all about strength and survival in a dying world that still insists on operating against you even as the government is extinct and the law is obsolete. Felker-Martin is relentless, a fierce storyteller, and this book pulls none of its punches.