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Book Review: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

 

Cover art for Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Tor Trade, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250794642

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook ( Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com )

 

Unless you are hardcore into extreme horror, you need an iron stomach for this one.

 

Manhunt is a response to gender apocalypse stories, such as Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, which do not address the existence of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals. Unlike those, Manhunt puts trans people front and center.

 

A plague, T. rex, has infected all individuals with a high level of testosterone (mostly men), causing physical and mental disintegration and reducing them to a set of impulses to rape, maim, and kill any living thing nearby. Trans women become manhunters because testicles and kidneys are a source of estrogen, which they need both to be feminized and to overcome the testosterone that would make them vulnerable to T. rex. The flip side of this is that TERFs have taken over and will shoot and kill any trans women. Fran and Beth are manhunters who have an unfortunate encounter with TERFs and are later attacked by a pack of men who rape Beth. They are rescued by a trans man, Robbie, and take their bounty, and Robbie, to Indi, who has medical training and can use the testicles to synthesize estrogen. Indi has been invited to be the doctor for a compound for trans women and brings Fran, Beth, and Robbie with her. While initially this seems a safer path, something is seriously wrong there. There’s a rebellion, the compound burns, and the survivors create a new community and start planning an attack on the TERFs.

 

Ramona is a TERF close to the leader, Teach. She is secretly involved with a trans woman, and when the relationship is discovered her lover is executed and she is put in charge of cleaning out all trans women from the city. Fran gets involved with her and Ramona betrays Teach. However, she is not caught because another woman confesses to helping the trans women. The scene of her execution is incredibly painful and gory. Felker-Martin’s answer to the question of what would happen if men really were out of the picture is that there are women who will step in to do the same kinds of terrible things.

 

This is rage-filled and clearly very personal to the author, who is a trans woman. It doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable or disturbing emotions or situations, I can’t begin to say how difficult this was for me to read and finish, but I also couldn’t look away. It’s a powerful book, with a lot about the value of community, and made me think about the difficulties trans people face that I have the privilege not to reckon with as a cis woman. I think it’s is likely to be a classic in the genre.

 

Contains: transphobia, transphobic slurs, cannibalism, rape, body horror

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on March 27, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds by Peter Adam Salomon

Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds by Peter Adam Salomon

PseudoPalms Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1093780673

Available: Paperback,  Kindle edition, audiobook

 

 

Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds has a fascinating concept, and turns out to be more relevant to our times than I’m sure the author expected. Taking place in the near future, I’d say this is more a sci-fi thriller than horror. Our protagonists are L and M, the only two occupants of a gigantic bunker on an Earth where all life appears to have been destroyed. Neither L or M have any memory of their lives prior to waking up in the bunker, and the parameters of the AI in charge are set to make it almost impossible to discover what happened and who they are. Their only escape is a drug that flatlines them for eight minutes and thirty-two seconds. During that time they “jump” into the minds of one of six gifted teenagers secretly working together on a complex, mysterious, and fatal project.  L and M are only able to get short glimpses, though, and have difficulty remembering what they’ve seen once they’ve been “brought back”. It takes an extended flatlining on M’s part, and rapid repeats of inducing her death on L’s part, to piece together the six teenagers’ terrifying plan and the consequences of its results.

While the idea is interesting, and puzzling the pieces together was enough to keep me reading, the lack of character development in this book is a serious flaw. Because L and M don’t have memories, and don’t seem to have much interest in even exploring much of the bunker, it is hard to get a sense of who they are and what they’re like. It’s unclear why they have to die repeatedly to learn about the past or why flatlining would specifically take them to random parts of these specific teens’ lives. Outside of all being genius-level intelligent, it’s also not really clear why these teens would choose to work together. While their leader is clearly alienated from humanity, others seem to have positive relationships, and their willingness to participate was confusing to me.  Although I ultimately found it to be unsatisfying,  I appreciated Salomon’s creativity,  and there were enough unexpected moments to keep me reading it all the way through in an afternoon.

 

Editor’s note:  Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds  was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on March 14, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Red Death by Birgitte Margen

 

The Red Death by Birgitte Märgen

Self-published, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1729311196

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

The Red Death is a thrilling tale of a deadly pandemic. The Red Death is caused by an unknown bacterium that caused an ancient pandemic before Pasteurella pestis and the Black Death, and now it has re-emerged in New York City. The Red Death causes hemorrhagic nodules in the lungs; its victims vomit blood as their lungs fill with it, and death follows within days of infection.Starting off with a few deaths, the story traces the spread and exponential growth of the epidemic.

The cast of characters includes a team of local CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) investigators in hazmat-suits, a rebuffed bacteriologist at the CDC national headquarters and a has-been paleoanthropologist in Las Vegas. What links the early victims? How is the disease spread? These are some of the questions they face.

Decades ago, the paleoanthropologist wrote about an ancient pandemic and an indigenous Amazonian tribe that was resistant to the disease.  His work was ridiculed, and he retreated into the bars in Las Vegas, but he has a sample of a rare plant that might have protected the tribe from the disease. Why won’t the CDC director authorize research on a vaccine?

Just as the number of victims increases exponentially, the action in New York City, Milwaukee, and the Amazon intensifies. Rival leaders of the Motombu tribe face off in a fight to the death, with the fate of the research team hanging in the balance. Will the leader of the breakaway cannibal faction win, dooming millions to the Red Death? Or, will the researchers’ friend triumph and lead them to the plant that could end the pandemic?

The author describes the problems CDC investigators and researchers face and their techniques. However, I think that her use of the term “vaccine” might not be appropriate. Vaccines usually contain attenuated microbes or their antigens that stimulate the recipient’s immune system, but in this book, a CDC investigator is infected and saves herself by injecting the paleoanthropologist’s decades-old plant extract. The extract might contain an antibiotic or an adjuvant to activate the immune system, but it probably doesn’t have bacterial antigens. Nevertheless, The Red Death is a worthwhile read. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

 

 

Posted on June 19, 2019 by , Reply
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