Gretchen Felker-MartinRezensionen

Cuckoo takes an ambitious and over-the-top idea and manages to bring it down to Earth enough to make it work.

You will care about the characters, even if the POV changes and the list of narrator seems to be ever-evolving, you just gotta hold on. The metaphor is just good enough to pack a punch, even if the big bad boss is something out of a fantasy book.
My only issue is the pacing, especially in the final part. I felt like the pacing in the first 70% was really good, while the rest of it felt a little bit rushed.

Still, I truly enjoyed reading this and did shed a tear or two (always a plus).

So many characters, so many discriptiona of gross smells and gross physicality

Content Note: rape, (critical treatment of) transmisia

Plot:
A few years ago, a mysterious illness swept the world that turned all cis men into feral beasts. Beth and Fran are traveling the country hunting for men to harvest their organs – as this is the only way they have to ensure that their testosterone levels never rise to a point that they will suffer the same fate, always taking care to avoid the militant TERFs that control most of the country. Meanwhile, Robbie has spend his time on his own, trusting nobody. But coincidence brings the three of them together and entwines their fates.

Manhunt is a reply to the myriad “gender plague” stories out there that not only considers but actually centers the trans perspective. As such, it is best read in the context of the political transmisic discussions of the last decade or so, though it is also a pretty good read in its own right.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2024/08/13/manhunt-gretchen-felker-martin/

joining the other readers in saying that the prologue was incredibly strong and drew me in almost instantly- unfortunately the rest of the story was just ok. the horror in this is SOLID with really grotesque imagery and i loved it. the issue is that after finishing the story i couldn't tell you a lot about each of the characters nor am i sure i could successfully name all of them. i don't know if that's because the book needed to be longer so we could spend more time with them individually or what. i just wish a better connection was built between myself and the characters AND between the characters themselves.½

DNF at 53%. Desperately wanted to finish this but I have no idea who anyone is and at a certain point stopped caring. Too many characters and I kept going because I thought it’d eventually come to me, but it just sunk me deeper into confusion. I also had a very very hard time grasping what was happening in action scenes. It was simple shit, like describing where we were physically, or how these monsters were speaking/using the bodies of these kids. The camp aspect was fascinating, but even that I found a bit unrealistic? They’ve been kidnapped and taken to an undisclosed location and they’re…doing dishes? Doing oral sex on each other in the middle of the night? Most of the teenagers who come back from those places talk about how they couldn’t even speak to other kids or they’d be punished, so I found this hard to believe. I think it works for the plot that they are rebelling and getting away with it, but in real life, I think they’d face intense consequences more often.

I loved this concept and I really was interested in how these kids end up though. Just not for me. Thanks Netgalley and Publisher for letting me read this eARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

It honestly reads like an angry man who hates women grabbed on to a workable concept and filled in the blanks with slavering psychotic breaks and said "Here!".

Hated it. Absolute trash. That's saying a lot considering I love horror and gore.vThis was a book club read and I'm sincerely considering leaving that club given that half of the members raved about how good this book is. The concept of sex based plague that focuses on the extinction/lessening of males instead of female like the usual trope drew me in from the summary. From a trans woman point of view also was another. I love splatterhorror a lot, mind twisting is delicious.

Within the first two chapters it was obvious this wasn't written by someone who was making a satire or statement on society: This author is obviously mentally unwell and was taking out their frustrations and deep seated personal issues on characters. Basic biology and medical science was bent so askew it wasn't even laughably cheesy, just eye rolling stupid. There were such ridgid stereotyping for every character and group rounded out with sociopolitical dogwhistles throught everything. And the rapes! Not to move the plot, set up any exposition or any reason to exist except simply to exist!

There's SO many better options for splattergore out there that are far better written, doesn't have the angry Tumbler teen angst turd fest, with good characters and beautifully gross.

*Edit.... I'll admit the cover was a wonderful choice. Tongue in cheek and beautiful. That's where the good ends.

Okay so this one is going to be a short review. I felt like this book took me forever to get through. In part that's because most of it made absolutely no sense at all. I think the author should have done some time setting up what was happening in a better way. The prologue did nothing but cause me to be confused because it had nothing to do with the main characters and just seemed like a cheap way to do something "scary." The "monster" or whatever it is really doesn't ever get explained in a clear way. The book is so focused on sexual innuendos that so much else gets lost. I think the book would have worked better if we had a clear break in character's perspectives instead of trying to follow all these different characters in one chapter. The number of characters made it hard to keep track of who was who. I love that the book was so focused on a vast range of the LGBTQ+ community but honestly that is the only thing that it had going for it. In the end for me this book just felt like a terrible imitation of It. I have no intention of reading it again... mainly because I still have no idea what it was even about.

It has been a while since I've read a book written with excruciatingly disturbing and disgusting details. I loved every page of this (lol I had to pause all snacking whilst consuming this book). I must now read everything else written by Gretchen Felker-Martin.

This horror-fantasy genre novel is a new entrant into the "scientifically impossible methods of bringing about the apocalypse/dystopia" pool. Here, a virus targets human testosterone and almost overnight turns all men into vicious large cats, complete with claws and barbed penises, which hunt down women in packs to rape and eat them.

Which is not actually the most notable thing about the novel. Our main protagonists are two trans women, Fran and Beth, who like other trans women avoid the virus by taking estrogen and using various testosterone-suppressing methods. More than feral feline men, they fear the ruling Maryland Womyn's Legion, literal feminazis out of Rush Limbaugh's wildest dreams, though called TERFs of course (also called "the same stupid white women who thought pussy hats could overthrow the government" among plenty of other insults; indeed there's a lot here for misogynistic right-wing men to like). Their shock troops, the XX (apologies to the excellent indie electronic band by that name), hunt down and execute trans women in the street when not shipping them off to labor camps, greet each other with a special fascist salute, and preach about the eternal pure Matriarchy they are building.

Reportedly the author says her novel was not written for cis people, which seems clear enough from the text as well. In that vein, there's a scene in which the killing of J.K. Rowling is gleefully recounted, which I have to say I found off-putting, not generally being supportive of fantasies of killing off one's ideological enemies, be they Rowling or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but then I'm not a member of a persecuted community which may appreciate reading a fantasy that does just that.

On the positive side Fran and Beth are complex and sympathetic characters, the plot moves quickly and the action is pretty good. It does bear a slight resemblance to [b:The Girl with All the Gifts|17235026|The Girl with All the Gifts (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)|M.R. Carey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403033579l/17235026._SY75_.jpg|23753235] which its press compares it too, though it is less literary than that horror novel, which I'm a big fan of.

I'd give it around 2.5 stars, only having read it because of its inclusion into a literary event I always take part in, but I can easily see its intended audience appreciating it much more highly.

I really was looking forward to the concept. I didn’t enjoy the writing. I’m not entirely sure splatterpunk is for me.

Like most books that suffer from hype by way of controversy, this book could best be described as "just okay." That anyone feels strongly about it one way or another is kind of baffling to me—especially since both fans and critics harp so hard on its soooooo disturbing!!!1!! I'm starting to think yall just haven't consumed horror media harder than Goosebumps.

Most of the...apolitical? elements are thin, but not so thin that the thin-ness impedes readability. The post-gender-apocalypse has produced a world where, apparently, most people live safely enough in towns and cities, more or less unthreatened by the rape zombies that roam the countryside, ready at any moment to provide swarms of gross-out danger when—and only when—the plot demands. It's like a late season of a long running zombie show where the excitement of seeing people get their arms ripped off has worn off and the writers have to scrape the bottom of the "people are the real monsters" barrel to keep the cash cow milky, except I didn't even get to see people get their arms ripped off.

The plot, like the threat level, is uneven. Tensions escalate and de-escalate as a way to move our heroines from one trauma to the next, independent of what has happened before or after. The effect, while not of great literary merit, is at least kind of effective—there's certainly some horror in a world where suffering is both inevitable and unearned, more acts of a cruel God than consequences of the characters' admittedly awful personalities. It also meant this was a quick read, which was fine by me.

As for the characters—well, they definitely exist, though they feel less like people and more like vehicles for suffering and self-loathing. I found them neither sympathetic enough to root for nor loathsome enough to root against. For the most part they fade into the background of their own narration as they rotate through a musical chairs of sex partners (or sexual assault partners, as the case may be).


The book isn't particularly successful as a political satire-slash-critique-slash-commentary on misogyny-slash-transphobia, either. Probably the most obvious issue is that Gretchen Felker-Martin has constructed a world where transphobia fundamentally makes sense and feels justified. Trans women in this world are at risk of becoming rape zombies if their supply of balls dries up—meaning they very much do pose a potential threat to everyone around them. While it's a good source of internal horror for the characters, it also renders the motivations of the TERF antagonists both reasonable and sympathetic.

And, on the subject of the TERFs: they did not strike me as very TERF-y. Or very consistent, for that matter. On one page, they're murdering trans women, and on the next they're offering trans women genital reassignment surgery and a place in the sisterhood—an offer that is, by all appearances, totally sincere. The TERF PoV character doesn't demonstrate any particularly transphobic views—she views trans women as women and refers to them as women in her narration. I'm not sure what the point was of even calling them TERFs, other than the fact that it's catchier than calling them transphobes.

In fact, the more I read, the less convinced I was that the author intended to critique these things. Gretchen Felker-Martin, as a Twitter personality, certainly seems to care more about being inflammatory than about offering salient observations about, like, anything. I don't know—maybe the expectation is unfair, but this book has definitely been pitched as a response to other "gender-cide" novels, if not as a response to transpobia at large, and it just doesn't work on that level.

This book is classified as horror, but it tries too hard to be simply shocking and disgusting. A virus has turned all men into animals who hunt women. Women try to keep the upper hand in this new society, but become militant. Most of the main characters in this tale are transwomen, some were in the process of transitioning when the virus happened. They are stuck between genders, hoping to hide from the cis-women and stay uneaten by the men. They survive by hunting men and eating their testicles and adrenal glands. How this helps them, I'm never quite sure. Wouldn't that expose them to testosterone and make them MORE attractive to the virus that affects men? the whole premise didn't make sense. Don't read this book while you are eating yoru breakfast!½

It honestly reads like an angry man who hates women grabbed on to a workable concept and filled in the blanks with slavering psychotic breaks and said "Here!".

Hated it. Absolute trash. That's saying a lot considering I love horror and gore.vThis was a book club read and I'm sincerely considering leaving that club given that half of the members raved about how good this book is. The concept of sex based plague that focuses on the extinction/lessening of males instead of female like the usual trope drew me in from the summary. From a trans woman point of view also was another. I love splatterhorror a lot, mind twisting is delicious.

Within the first two chapters it was obvious this wasn't written by someone who was making a satire or statement on society: This author is obviously mentally unwell and was taking out their frustrations and deep seated personal issues on characters. Basic biology and medical science was bent so askew it wasn't even laughably cheesy, just eye rolling stupid. There were such ridgid stereotyping for every character and group rounded out with sociopolitical dogwhistles throught everything. And the rapes! Not to move the plot, set up any exposition or any reason to exist except simply to exist!

There's SO many better options for splattergore out there that are far better written, doesn't have the angry Tumbler teen angst turd fest, with good characters and beautifully gross.

*Edit.... I'll admit the cover was a wonderful choice. Tongue in cheek and beautiful. That's where the good ends.

alas, and, furthermore, alack.

I actually would rather become a cannibal zombie than go off my T though, rip to Robbie but I'm different

Despite the billing, this doesn't feel like horror to me. It feels like revenge, gore, and erotica. It would have been easier to follow and could have developed a stronger message had the author spent as much energy on the plot as she does on the sex scenes. The science is slippery at best, and with the erratic accents and mispronunciation of town names, the narration was unpleasant to listen to. I kind of wish I'd bailed.½

I'm not sure how I feel. Gore is not a problem for me. Way too into horror for that. Sex doesn't bother me unless it's superfluous. A lot of the sex felt superfluous in this one. Though at the same time it's nice that it wasn't cis/het/mono normative. It was a bit on the nose in terms of metaphors, etc, but it was an engaging read.

2022. A virus has turned all the men into zombies who eat women and animals. I saw this called “splattercore” somewhere. It is extremely gory and disgusting. After the plague there’s a TERF army going after trans femmes, ostensibly because they could catch the plague, if they still had testes and couldn’t get estrogen. Really just an excuse to hunt them down. A few trans people and allies band together and a massive battle ensues. Well to be more accurate, it’s about a thousand ravenous, slavering men the TERFS have led to the trans peoples’ fort, and 60 TERFS, against about 30 trans people in a fort. The TERFS also have a battleship offshore, but the trans people have people onboard who sink her before she does too much damage. Remarkably the TERFS don’t win, but it feels like they may as well have. One of my favorite characters, Fran, gets killed in the battle. There’s one trans masculine character, Robbie, fighting with the trans people. He was with Fran for a while, but they broke up. After the battle he decides to try to get to New Mexico to find his father’s family. The ending is bleak. You really don’t know how anytran is going to survive the hellscape that the country has become. The action takes place between Boston and southern Maine, but the TERFS hold an area all the way from Boston to Maryland, at least. There’s lots of t4t sex and transfemme/lesbian sex. It was way more sex and gore than I like. But it was refreshing to have so much trans variety in one book. It was really funny. At one point they tell how J. K. Rowling had holed up with a bunch of TERFS in her castle and they’d locked up all their men and boys in the dungeon or something, but they got out somehow and ate everyone. Basically I loved the book in spite of the gore and the bleak unrelenting hellscape. Definitely not for everyone.

Is there a non-transphobic version of “all the men/XYs die”? This book sets out to offer that, though there is plenty of transphobia expressed within the narrative, as TERFs try to eradicate trans women as a biological threat. As with the X-Men-as-analogue-to-LGBTQ+ people, where many mutants are dangerous in unusual ways to others, the book’s virus means that anyone who naturally produces a significant amount of testosterone is in fact in danger of becoming a cannibalistic monster (a Man) who will rape to death anyone it hasn’t eaten first. That means that XXs with PCOS also turn, and pregnancy testosterone fluctuations can also mean a death sentence (in a sign about how much body horror there is in the book, the babies eating their ways out of the uterus are not the grossest things described). Trans women survive by consuming estrogen, which post-collapse-of-society is often most easily achieved by killing Men and eating their testicles, one source of the titular Manhunt. Cis men survive, if they do, by also consuming estrogen and, in TERF territory, by being castrated. The main characters are two trans women, a trans man they join up with under dangerous circumstances, the cis doctor whose skills make her valuable in the new order, and a cis woman who rises in the TERF army despite or because of her desire for non-cis sex. I found the narrative too crapsack world for my tastes, though not particularly implausible. Class oppression manages to survive at least some period beyond the death of 90% of people, and along with the horrors inflicted by Men, there is additional torture, rape, and forced medical experimentation. There was something striking about the fact that, on the East Coast at least, the majority of survivors appeared to be cityfolk, apparently more able to band together against Men than rural dwellers.

Brilliant high-concept horror, but yikes is it brutal and gruesome. The major problem I had, other than the unrelentingly harsh tone, was that the transitions between point-of-view, at least in the audiobook version, were really hard to keep up with. That said, I did enjoy the centering of trans women and trans men perspectives, and the delicious identity of the villains.

If you've been holding off on reading Manhunt because of gender apocalypse burnout - fiction and non-fiction alike - don't. This book is a raw, white-hot genre adrenaline shot; an alka-seltzer solvent of existential horror. Pitch perfect and gorgeously gutting.

beautiful, gripping book that was impossible to put down. felker-martin's empathy for her characters is astounding. and no, it isn't hard to find someone to 'root for,' but you shouldn't need that to enjoy a book.

Ok, here it goes. This book was truly unlike anything I've ever read. I mean, the cover gives you a pretty good idea about how this is gonna go. I've always been a fan of apocalyptic stories and this one had an unusual twist by it's characters being trans.
Trigger warning: This book involves rape, cannibalism, gore, and trans violence.
The plot in itself was interesting. Five years after the testosterone in men causes them to become basically wild, raping, cannibalizing creatures; the only survivors are women and trans men and women who have been on hormones to help them transition. They survive by hunting down the feral men and "harvest" their testicles and livers to process estrogen. They also simply eat the items if there is no time to refine it. Or, as one scene described, how to tilt the pan so the balls were evenly coated with butter while sautéing them. (Just no.)
So, the cis-women are the "bad guys" in this story, they hunt down trans people and crucify them as examples of traitors to their genders. It's really just crazy.
All in all, a good plot, interesting ideas, but it was really hard to find a person to root for, they all had serious flaws which made them very hard to relate to.

3.5

It honestly reads like an angry man who hates women grabbed on to a workable concept and filled in the blanks with slavering psychotic breaks and said "Here!".

Hated it. Absolute trash. That's saying a lot considering I love horror and gore.vThis was a book club read and I'm sincerely considering leaving that club given that half of the members raved about how good this book is. The concept of sex based plague that focuses on the extinction/lessening of males instead of female like the usual trope drew me in from the summary. From a trans woman point of view also was another. I love splatterhorror a lot, mind twisting is delicious.

Within the first two chapters it was obvious this wasn't written by someone who was making a satire or statement on society: This author is obviously mentally unwell and was taking out their frustrations and deep seated personal issues on characters. Basic biology and medical science was bent so askew it wasn't even laughably cheesy, just eye rolling stupid. There were such ridgid stereotyping for every character and group rounded out with sociopolitical dogwhistles throught everything. And the rapes! Not to move the plot, set up any exposition or any reason to exist except simply to exist!

There's SO many better options for splattergore out there that are far better written, doesn't have the angry Tumbler teen angst turd fest, with good characters and beautifully gross.

*Edit.... I'll admit the cover was a wonderful choice. Tongue in cheek and beautiful. That's where the good ends.