Manhunt

Grotesque queer horror of the most beautiful and trashy variety. It is so rare to find something that so bluntly captures the trans experience, trans survival, love and gore wrapped in a scrapnel coated blanket. It is uncompromising, at times bordering on cruel, the accumulation of a thousand daily tragedies spilling out over a ceaseless apocalypse.

Within that pain are the pockets of hope that sustain us. The relationships and messy connections and bitter loyalty of communities continually rebuilding themselves because nobody else is going to save them. It is an uncertain future, but a future all the same.

Felker-Martin does pulp-y action and violence really well. She also does deeply moving, intense feelings about sex (and gender!) well. The shifts between the two things tonally weren't enjoyable for me--though perhaps that was part of the point? It reminded me in a way of Lovecraft Country, mixing real-world horror and pulp-y horror, but I was left wanting a bit more cohesion between the two.

Still, this was a fun and brutal read, alternatively, and I look forward to reading her next book.

This book started and ended strong, but the middle was hard to get through for me.
I probably would have enjoyed it more if there had been less POV characters and perhaps if we had spent less time with Fran which I found rather insufferable and deeply unlikeable.
Sex seemed to replace any kind of relationship building, I can understand where the author is coming from with that, a lot of us do have a hard time differentiating between sex and intimacy, but the end result, for me, was that the relationships all felt unearned, shallow and adolescent. That aspect could have been interesting if it hadn't been the same for every single character.
There is a lot of hate and even more self-hate in this book, a lot of the characters do not like themselves not one bit, so it's a bleak reading experience no matter who you are (fat, trans and pretty, trans and not pretty, soft, tattooed...), I think that was part of the point Gretchen was trying to make (there can be no utopia because we hate ourselves as much if not more than others hate us) but yeah check trigger warnings before you read this cause it pulls no punches.
I wanted to love this book and I'm really bummed that I just didn't.

This one was pretty challenging in some ways for me, as a straight, cis man—not because the cis men have become zombies, but because the life experiences I was reading about were vastly different from my own, and in some ways, unfamiliar or new to me and in others, just hard to hear about because I know how real some of that trauma etc is. The characters and the plot were novel and entertaining. I rooted for the protagonists and enjoyed their victories. I also appreciated some of the winks—I think some of the characters traveled through Derry, Maine (? maybe I misheard, listening on audiobook), and the terfs' warship was named the Galbraith, an obvious nod to JKR's pseudonym which I understand itself is a nod to a historical transphobe of some kind?

The narrator mispronounced Worcester, which is basically a crime for a book set in New England.

This was tough. I want to read transfemme horror, and I want to read transmisogynists getting it like they deserve. I want to read splatterpunk and shock horror, body horror and violence so intimate that it makes me want to climb out of my skin and shower while I put my shell in the wash. I read those genres indivually and love them.

And yet. I struggled with this. It's brutal and violent- but I've read worse. It's a little corny and overwrought- but I've read worse. It pivots between POVs of the good folks and the irredeemably-evil-but-well-rounded-and-human evil- and I've read both better and worse.

I liked it, I think. I won't read it again. It kind of sucks to read this sort of bigoted violent apocalypse and see edges of reality. It made me sick, but not in a thrilling way. It made me have to put the book down. That's a triumph, for sure. And yet I don't feel good.

I enjoyed the prose during the zombie body horror stuff. I enjoyed the (gratuitous and non-gratuitous) sex. I enjoyed the zombie apocalypse world-building. I enjoyed the community themes. I hated the TERFs, both in the way I was supposed to and I think in ways I wasn't supposed to. I wish Ramona's chapters weren't so long, though I think Ramona is well-written. I'm not sure. I'll leave this review for now.