Men are monsters. This sentiment is literalized to a terrifying degree in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s post-apocalyptic horror novel Manhunt, which came out just last week. This book is gruesomely violent and goes to a lot of dark places, so it won’t be for everyone. But it gives a unique take on a gendered apocalypse from a transgender perspective.
Life as a trans woman was precarious enough before the end of the world. But after the t. rex virus turned anyone with high enough testosterone levels into mindless cannibalistic beasts, trans women like Fran and Beth are in danger from all sides. Their own bodies could turn on them if they don’t keep their levels of testosterone down with a steady supply of estrogen and spiro. The need to constantly hunt down more estrogen puts them in the path of packs of feral men. And as if that wasn’t enough, the east coast of the former United States is being taken over by an army of militarized TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) whose top priority is wiping out the few trans women who have managed to survive this long in the post-apocalyptic landscape. Luckily, Beth and Fran don’t have to go it alone. By their side is their trusty medical doctor Indi, who patches up their injuries and processes their scavenged hormones. And soon their little found family is joined by Robbie, a trans guy who is slowly learning how to open himself up to other people after experiencing a terrible tragedy. But with the soldiers of the Matriarchy closing in, these four friends will need to fight to carve out a place for themselves in this new world.
Manhunt blends elements of the gendered apocalypse novel with the zombie apocalypse genre to create an apocalypse story that is new and unique. Early apocalypse stories—from the very earliest with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man—tend to focus on male survivors, or bands of mostly men, with perhaps a few women to be fought over as love interests. Even other stories with an apocalyptic event that targets men, such as the comic book series Y: The Last Man, still focus on men as their central characters. Manhunt instead depicts a post-apocalyptic society populated almost entirely by women and focuses on the plight of trans women at its center. The inclusion of trans women along with trans men and nonbinary characters adds some nuance to a premise that in other hands could easily devolve into reductive views of gender and bio-essentialism.
As for its connection to the zombie apocalypse genre, readers will find the concept of a sudden and unexplained virus that turns a significant portion of the population into flesh-hungry monsters quite familiar. But Manhunt differs from zombie novels in several important ways. On the surface level, the monsters that the men become aren’t shuffling corpses but rather are described in animalistic terms—almost dog- or wolf-like. They travel in packs and are reduced to their basest instincts: eating, fighting, and fucking. On a deeper level, zombie novels are generally about fears of contagion or infiltration from an outside source. In contrast, the primary anxiety explored in Manhunt is about our own inner natures. It is suggested several times throughout the novel that the monsters created by the virus are only a more extreme manifestation of the selfishness, violence, and crudeness already inherent in men before the apocalypse. The question that divides the protagonists from the TERFs is centered on the inner nature of trans women: deep down, are they truly women, or just violent and monstrous men waiting to break free? By the end of the novel, we see that trans characters like Beth and Fran are capable of nurturing love and sisterhood, while many of the cis women who pride themselves on their femaleness wind up simply replicating the hierarchy, violence, and cruelty that had defined patriarchal society. I found the novel ultimately a bit reductive in its conclusion that the ability to form community based on love is evidence of a feminine inner nature and that the militant TERFs have a masculine inner nature rather than truly questioning or deconstructing this binary. But while not really a sophisticated philosophical treatise, I think Manhunt is primarily a revenge fantasy romp in which the naked fascism of TERF ideology is put on display for all to see and trans women get to kick some serious butt at the end of the world.
If that description sounds appealing to you, you can find Manhunt on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments.