Book Review: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

And a note on how to read bad writing.

Pandemonium, 1841. John Martin.

How would malignant narcissists behave in a post-apocalyptic world? Despite never intending it, Gretchen Felker-Martin (GFM) answers this question in Manhunt published by Tor, a division of Macmillan. The novel follows the journey of two trans-identified males, Beth and Fran, through the pillaged New England coast. An obese and melancholic Indian “cis woman” conveniently named Indi and a reticent trans-identified female Robbie join the duo to make sense of a world ravaged by the “t.rex” plague. The virus attacks people with high testosterone levels (overwhelmingly men) and turns them into unthinking ogres that rape and devour whatever is left of humanity.

To avoid the same ghastly fate because they are biologically male after all, Beth and Fran desperately hunt for estrogen. When they aren’t busy calling orphaned and widowed women “neo-fascist Nazis,” “cunts,” and “chromosome crusaders,” they can be found having mostly joyless sex that borders on assault, eating testicles lathered in butter, and experiencing erections while trying to kill “cis” militia women who, in this world, execute trans-identified males lest they become feral behemoths, and snarl at trans-identified females for betraying the matriarchy. Manhunt is, according to NPR, “brilliantly imagined” literature for the LGBTQ.

For the purpose of efficiency and given I am unfamiliar with Substack’s position on unfettered expression, I will use the author’s preferred pronouns: she and her. This is neither an endorsement of the recent ideology that comes with stipulating pronouns for what can be identified 99 percent of the time by simply glancing at another human nor is it to accommodate her fantasies (of which there seem many and some quite troubling ones, including a nail gun fetish that inevitably appears in her book) but to avoid strikes.

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The end of the world is never truly the end of the world. Post-apocalyptic stories ponder on one of the oldest questions humans have asked each other: "What happens after the end of existence?" To that end, these novels help us stand on the edge of the abyss and face that terror through the catharsis and caution in fiction. Some of these stories become cult classics and others come from cults. Manhunt is a product of the latter.

This is technically the queer theory version of Raccoona Sheldon's Screwfly Solution. I noticed this when I first heard about GFM’s book. Sheldon’s story details an inexplicable shift in humans, which causes men to engage in mass femicide. Fathers kill daughters, husbands strangle wives, brothers hunt sisters; in this world, a perfectly normal man walking down the sidewalk will suddenly punch a young girl to pulp and mist. It’s the stuff that comes out of an Andrea Dworkin reading group, sure, but it isn’t completely unforgivable literature. I read it when I was a teenager. It is meant to shock but despite the madness, The Screwfly Solution avoids the traps that Manhunt falls right into: cynicism and narcissism. Men, even when they become beasts in Sheldon’s world, are not calculating villains hellbent on carnage but victims of something unholy and beyond their control. And the women left behind do not let their political loyalties prevent them seeing this naked truth.

There is no such complexity or depth in Manhunt. People are either completely right or wholly wrong. The only occasions you find yourself in ambiguous territory is when there is sex involved. And there is a lot of sex. It is hard to tell where there is love made between two people and where rape occurs. Most of the sex is pockmarked by misery and insatiable longing for something somewhere else. And despite the abundant descriptions of bodily fluids, holes, skin, “blue white milk” secreting from nipples, and other graphic details, Manhunt is sterile. In a story about human relations after a virus has decimated virtually all good in men, I would think, those left behind—having felt that brush with death—would love the survivors more ferociously.

If you are looking for Schopenhauer’s der Wille zum leben, you won’t find it in Manhunt. Instead, GFM’s protagonists are flat and predictable, driven by a furious combination of lust and disgust for “TERFs.” Beth and Fran’s allies are straight out of a Tumblr forum or coastal activist group; a gloomy and severely overweight Indi whose main character purpose is to artificially supply estrogen to trans women and recall the days when she could argue with Twitter users about whether sex should be allowed at Pride parades. Consider the passage:

Indi thought with a bittersweet pang of regret that every time she’d hear the words ‘queer community’ used like a cudgel or posited as some benevolent given, every argument she’d had about lesbian utopianism or gay communes or whether or not sex should be allowed at Pride parades–fuck you, of course it should–on one of her scrupulously locked and hidden Twitter accounts, no one had ever had any idea what that meant.

Then there is Robbie. The mysterious, buttoned-up trans man lost a loved one to the testosterone rage-mutate virus and had to put him down. Regardless of your political beliefs, this is obviously heartbreaking but you wouldn’t know because GFM is too busy flooding Manhunt with scenes depicting natal females getting gutted or raped or both, one of the main characters getting gang-raped by feral men, dead-weight sex scenes, sudden trips to childhood involving either abusive or absent elders, ressentiment toward beauty, a thorough hatred for “white suburban” women and anyone who is ontologically similar, and other inanities such as odd similes for gun sounds. “The submachine gun barked like sped-up footage of a Bichon Frise having some kind of seizure.” No weapon sounds like this.

Robbie’s loss is the only time in the expansive 300+ pages of Manhunt where, as readers, we get a tiny glimpse into what it would feel like to lose a natal male relation to the plague. There are no sympathetic portrayals of the “cis” men who succumbed to the disease; GFM briefly and derisively mentions their wives and dominatrixes in the same passage, only to reveal her inability to imagine love without rot, marital bond without infidelity.

I have said to friends that misandry and misogyny, in trace amounts, are natural elements of the human condition. They will appear in human expression. How we keep restraints on those primordial feelings is a matter of social contracts, philosophies, individual agreements, evolved ideas of autonomy, and little promises men and women have made to each other in countless capacities over thousands and thousands of years. But abject paranoia toward either sex is unnatural. It may be chic these days to wish death on “cis” men and women but it makes for turgid, insincere, and ugly writing.

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Little time is spent understanding why the many villains in Manhunt make the decision to become evil. Cartoonishly demonic products of a jaundiced imagination, the main antagonist is Teach, described by the author as a “thin, long-haired woman” who once worked at Guantanamo Bay. For someone like me, this should have been an immediately odious individual. This person previously tortured people on specious ground somewhere in Cuba? I’ll happily hate her, no problem. But the Gitmo detail, just like the name choice for “Indi,” the move to dub a black TERF “Karen” (who meets a grisly end), the idea to call scared women “chromosome crusaders,” the repeated mentioning of erections in proximity of a woman being seriously injured or potentially killed (curiously enough, none of the trans characters express clear arousal around bloodthirsty men to this degree), and other fragments in Manhunt are all decisions the author seems to have made to imbue the story with weight and meaning. But they add nothing. Scattered here and there like half-thoughts, the details never strike as wit or light or sense but dull, morose noise.

It isn’t clear why one of the major leftist podcast men called Manhunt “a deep gift of human understanding and empathy.” It could be that he is hesitant to mock the socially anointed trans rights activist literature or it could be that he sincerely believes in the idea. Whatever it is, Manhunt is neither deep nor empathetic. It is essentially a collection of tweets that one could easily attribute to the current American Civil Liberties Union or some deranged troll who feels sexual thrill at the thought of crushing a woman’s skull. Consider another excerpt:

The tattooed woman [Teach] said something that made her retinue laugh. Fran watched her lips move, watched the play of muscles under her smooth face as she smiled. A cold thrill went up her spine. God, you don’t need to have a wet dream about a fucking gender-essentialist neofascist. […] Her cock was hard, tenting the front of her stupid cargo shorts, and she was seized suddenly by the ridiculous fear that the pale woman could see it.

GFM believes art should have more rape. She says that one cannot wish these difficult truths away. I am inclined to agree with her as far as pretending terrible things don’t exist goes. Just like rape exists, so does mental illness. The depiction of mental health problems, including gender dysphoria, should be treated with the same logic: brutally honest, not sugarcoated by activists who refuse to admit the inconvenient facts such as no feminist activist—no matter how truculent some of them are and can be—has ever killed a trans woman or other uncomfortable findings such as trans women are often murdered by their own lovers and not by middle-aged mothers online, that their own communities are often the most precarious, unstable, and nihilistic places for a mentally distressed person to be. But I have a suspicion this is where GFM and her fans will suddenly have a problem with honest art.

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I doubt this was her intention but GFM wrote villains normal people will instantly cheer for. Shared from the perspective of a trans woman, the natal female militias are trigger-happy executioners, foot soldiers for “bio-essentialism,” the Chromosomewaffen XX, and the occasional chaser. But viewed from the vantage of a person who is not immersed in Judith Butler’s screeds or from the vision of your regular Joe or Jane who has the right to simply disagree with the whole thing, the picture is crystal clear.

These are women left to defend themselves in a world that mortally wounds those who don’t look over their shoulder. They have lost their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, boyfriends, friends, mentors, relatives, and other links to the world. Since GFM mistakes totalizing narrative for realism, we are never told about their agony and their unfathomable loss. This failure to deliver character gradation and narrative refinement seems to be the consequence of spending too much time reading academic handwringing and howling over the “cis-het nuclear family” and inevitably becoming deaf and blind to the truth that millions of us have perfectly normal relations with “cis” men. Men we respect and love and need in our lives for mirth, strength, and safety.

The author’s bizarre sense-making affects principal and minor developments. For example, we are never told how J.K. Rowling comes to socialize with rogue military contractors. She isn’t set on fire, as some believed. Her castle collapses on her while her fair-weather friends, Blackwater mercenaries, loot her. Of course, one should ask: why would a woman with categorically antiwar politics befriend contractors from a private security company? It makes no sense. But little does in Manhunt. After all, this is a post-apocalyptic world where misgendering makes our protagonists more livid than acute food shortage, natal male infants eating their way out of their expecting mothers, sautéing testicles for dinner, and other stomach-churning details.

You would imagine in such Hobbesian terror, rational beings would put aside all differences and work toward realizing fundamental human ends. But because this is not the work of a rational person, the majority of Manhunt is spent hissing, spitting, sweating, and shaking over petty and narcissistic disagreements and demands. After Robbie pumps metallic nails into Teach’s face and body, Beth–who is six feet and two inches tall and weighs 200 pounds “with her long horse face, broad shoulders, and blocky jaw”–proceeds to shoot an arrow into her mouth, tearing her flesh apart, knocking her teeth out, and then kicks her face in after she makes the fatal mistake of deadnaming Beth. Behold:

Beth turned to face the gagging thing, bracing herself against the sides of the door, rain lashed her back. Teach smiled at her around the splintered shaft. Her thin, bloodless lips twitched. “Brandon,” she croaked. The words slurred and horribly babyish on her split and bloody tongue. “Brandon.”

“No.” [Beth] slammed her boot into the other woman’s grisly smirk. The arrow snapped. Bone gave between wall and hardened rubber. Beth drew her leg back, cocked her knee, and kicked out hard again. A gurgling laugh came from the ruined face. The lone remaining eye, pale and unblinking, stared at her through a mask of blood and broken skin. Her knuckles popped where she held tightly to the door frame. She brought her leg up a third time. The woman’s hand came with it. Fingers clinging weakly to the gory sole and still that horrible, wet grunt of a laugh. “Heh heh heh.” And black blood pouring from the ruined mouth. How did she know?

Beth jerked her foot away from Teach’s feeble grip and drove it back down like a piston with a final, awful crunch.

Quite revealing.

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Horror is not supposed to ingratiate itself to polite sensibilities. Good horror turns the familiar into the unfamiliar. I enjoy the genre in written and visual formats, and I have been a fan since I was seven. I certainly don’t believe that horror literature, including splatterpunk controversies, needs to be approved by society at a 100 percent level. I love American Psycho, both the book and film, and I enjoy listening to people excitedly praise or lambast it. It’s not for everyone and that’s fine. (“You’re not terribly important to me,” Patrick Bateman could say to his critics and walk away to return some video tapes.)

The problem with a book like Manhunt is not just the dull as ditchwater writing, the relentless time skips, the gloom and doom that permeates almost every character like a viscous, cancerous venom, the impossibly evil villains that were born irreparable and are somehow a bigger threat than the mutated men in the woods with barbed penises, the bunker trust fund girl who wanted to have a baby at all costs, the filler text with Beth or Fran or some other trans woman becoming a sex slave for “cis” women (again, unlikely), or the scene where the black TERF named Karen is brutally murdered as Teach removes her womb with a knife in front of a feverish legion of “TERFs” (yet again, this is the author’s imagination). The problem with Manhunt is that you’re not allowed to publicly dislike it without being labelled a bigot, transphobe, “TERF scum,” and so on. Criticism for Manhunt is not seen as a normal kind of reaction to literature but as prejudice against a protected class. It goes from being a work of fiction to a quasi-religious text.

Consider American Psycho again. Many condemned Bret Easton Ellis for the novel, castigating the misogyny and racism they perceived in Bateman’s character. How cruel he was, how misanthropic. But publishers never presented American Psycho as a pinnacle of righteousness and unquestionable good; you don’t risk account suspension or an HR meeting if you express disdain for the novel and its characters. It was and is understood by most fans and critics alike that Bateman was the face of a totally alienated man who, even when he tried for fleeting seconds, could not come to relate or belong. An endless black hole sitting among his peers.

You are expected to either fawn over Manhunt and view it as a “cautionary tale against cis supremacy” or shut up and keep it moving. You are not allowed to ridicule it and walk away without receiving bestiality porn, suicide encouragement, and death threats as I witnessed. GFM disliked that I didn’t take Manhunt seriously enough, that I noticed the psychologically unhealthy underpinnings of the plot. Her response is a reflection of her own insecurities as a person and writer.

I approached the book thinking it could have potential. You never know with these things. GFM is not capable of giving us the modern Cthulhu because that requires honesty and pointing to real tyranny, but she is skilled at writing some natural sceneries. Reading her passages, you might feel situated in a harrowing New England. I have always appreciated rich descriptions of nature and to that degree, GFM does a good job. It’s a shame that walking, talking clichés populate those landscapes.

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When I first announced I would review the book, I clearly mentioned how questionable its premise was: natal females hunting natal males down. A story needs to be at least 40 percent believable for the reader to invest in the characters. But Manhunt is an unwitting admission of distorted thinking on part of the author.

Consider the truth that many gender postmodernists and TRAs deny or downplay: Male puberty has the organizational and permanent effect of giving men, on average, more physical strength than women. Men will have, on average, more oxygenated blood, more bone density, better upper-body muscle mass. Bigger hearts, bigger lungs. Those are the advantages a man has in a normal world. A virus that accelerates testosterone to abnormally high levels in a demographic with higher advantage as is, leading to an apocalypse in North America? Women would stand no chance against men, “cis” or not.

It would have been one thing to posit them as Hitler youths with XX tattoos as an edgy story where the joke is obvious (hell, I’d read it) but the author sincerely believes in political fictions like “trans genocide” and earnestly views natal female critics as fascists. Or cockroaches, in my case.

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Despite its multiple failings, the author’s arrogance and her juvenile need to be praised and condescended to, and the fanbase’s pathological hostility to any disagreement (this is not unique to trans literature; stans are this way universally), I still don’t believe Manhunt should be banned as some have argued.

This is a foul and inadvertently telling fiction, in my opinion. It can be approached in essentially two ways. The first way to engage with Manhunt is to blindly praise it because it comes from your ideological cohort, and loyalty—the paragon of virtue—trumps quality, clarity, principle, and everything else. You are barely a reader but a passionate chela. And there is some benefit to that obedience, too. Maybe GFM will look at you calling the politically multivaried critics of her bad writing “TERFs” and “bitches” and “cis scum” and eventually she may pat your head as one does a dog. Of course, you secretly know there is no equilibrium in this reader-writer relationship. But if political allegiance is your impetus when you buy a book, this is the monocultural route to take.

The second way to engage with Manhunt is to read it as one did just a few years ago when cross-pollination engagement and association wasn’t socially injurious. Without fealty to icons or movements. To approach it prepared, knowing that it could impress you. And when it doesn’t, you don’t pretend the emperor has clothes. You notice and point and feel pity for those who have—in their feverish impulse to be seen as holding the right and correct opinions among their peers—denied themselves two things that make life good: taste and self-respect.