It not only displays a mastery of horror’s conventions, but it also tears open the rich (and ripe) possibilities of trans horror for the world to see. The prose and pacing embody the slow drawback of a bow thrown into release with the shot of an arrow, never missing its target the building tension of being edged to the pleasure of an orgasm. Through gruesome bodily description, sharp emotional intuition, and searing sociopolitical criticism, Manhunt is horrifying, at times titillating, and even hilarious - but most importantly, it thrills at every turn.

Felker-Martin’s critical eye manifests gleefully in her fiction as she dares you to turn away but compels you to keep looking. In the year leading up to her debut, she has written about the importance of confronting the horrors of sexual abuse and “the deployment of victimhood as an unimpeachable defense,” all around laying the groundwork for the understanding that art does not harm people - people harm people. Released the same week that Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for citizens to report the families of transgender children and Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine - and just two months after Parul Sehgal made “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” in The New Yorker - Felker-Martin’s horror novel cunningly weaves trans determinism, war, and trauma together in an effort to locate joy, empathy, and pleasure in a world on fire.įelker-Martin is a fierce defender of transgressive fiction against the brand of puritan neoliberalism that seeks to limit the genre by leveraging the language of harm, autonomy, and consent. FEW NOVELS ARRIVE so perfectly in tandem with their moment of release, but Manhunt, the debut novel from Gretchen Felker-Martin, is not like other novels.

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