As I write this, a leaked draft has been circulating from the Supreme Court that indicates a massive overturning of Roe verse Wade – the historical 1973 case granting unrestricted abortion rights for women – that would strip bodily autonomy and safe access to abortion. We’ve already seen states around the country begin lobbying, in the wake of Florida’s bill prohibiting the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation, to strip the LGBTQ+ community of even discussing (in a purported safe and educational space) their on-going struggle for equality. With the debut novel Manhunt, author Gretchen Felker-Martin’s post-apocalyptic rally cry on individuality and the human body, a virus that infects those with a particular level of testosterone has enveloped the world into a frightful existence, where TERF groups (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) rove the desolate landscape hell-bent on exterminating the transgender community while herds of infected, ravenous men rape and pillage.
It’s a survivalist horror mash-up that floats in the realm of science fiction, where the world as we know it is ravaged with disease that sees society crumbling. But within the current landscape it feels woefully real; a tangible nightmare where identity and bodily autonomy is ripped from the clutches of an entire gender spectrum that continues to fight an uphill battle for identity.
Navigating this dire global happening are high school friends Fran and Beth, two transgender women who scour the countryside in search of organs to harvest from feral men in order to produce estrogen that will keep their levels of T from running too high.
When a chance encounter brings our two protagonists face to face with a TERF militia group – run by a sadistic guerilla leader named Teach – the two are rescued by Robbie, a transgender man who has been surviving on his own ever since the virus took the ones he loves. After meeting up with Indi, a cis-gendered fertility specialist who helps the two women process their estrogen, the four must uproot their temporary existence after the TERF’s cease control of their territory, sending them spiraling further into the over-grown wild of a dangerous new humanity.
Gretchen Felker-Martin captures this world – all the Greater Boston area and the surrounding New England countryside – with a lush excessiveness, often describing the dense vegetation as if it were a body. “Limbs of half-grown pines”, “delicate blades of grass sprouted like arm hair”, “crotch of two thick branches”. Every bit of this wild existence feels teeming with suffocating flora, its over-abundance swarming our protagonists like the frenzied oppressors who want nothing more than to exterminate or feed off the trans scraps of the old world. Even the way the infected mutate – “dermal fissures that wept pus and cloudy blood before scabbing over, bursting and scabbing again until the skin was nearly an inch thick in places” – acts like the natural world consuming, growing and existing profusely over its remaining populace with a fevered hunger and code that propagandizes transgender as a transgression.
So much of Manhunt feels like an exploration of the human body, a blossoming of identity that’s tethered to survival in the most personal and dire of ways. Both Fran and Beth explore each other and those who cross their path with an almost grave detailing; bodies come together through thick heat that radiate with longing or collide across bramble in acts of aggression. Our survivors must contend with permeating lust while navigating enemies that move on all fours with sinewy muscles and groups who roam the countryside on motorcycles with automatic weapons in droves that achingly compound the isolation of trans equality. Fran and Beth, unaware of how abundant or sparse the remaining transgender population is, represent a bastion of hope for people who have been fighting to exist since, well, forever. Gretchen Felker-Martin, a transgender woman herself, captures what it means to be placed on the knife’s edge of existence with a profound direness that even the most intimate of moments feel equally exhilarating and terrifying.
This is partly what makes Manhunt such a heavy declaration on survival and the horrors that go with it. Every bit of its world feels so much less fantastical than a post-apocalyptic story might embody. Similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – another grim, pragmatic exploration of survival horror – this worldly catastrophic take on life-and-death never truly leaves the old world behind, despite taking place 5 or so years after T-Day; the recorded moment in which testosterone levels began creating an even more uninhibited carnal craving in men.
It might be easy to write this mean, brutally honest and yearningly heartfelt debut novel off as one that’s well, just not written for you, but like the scabbed skin of the infected, that sort of facile way out would be lined with cracks. Manhunt aches with a brilliant new voice that demands to be heard in a world that actively looks to silence the transgender community, determining for millions what it means to exist. Every bit of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s words exude a just anger, often evoking disgust and revolt in its readers at not just what vitriol is aimed at a marginalized community, but what the world forces them to do in order to survive. Manhunt, in all its vexation and indignation towards the world, somehow manages to be one of the most breathless testaments to the human spirit, and no matter your gender identity, it should absolutely be at the top of your reading list this summer.
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