The world has been ravaged by a plague that has turned anyone with enough testosterone into a cannibalistic automaton. Beth and Fran, two trans women, fight to survive in this wasteland, battling extremist TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) while harvesting the testicles of zombified men—a reliable source of estrogen. Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s new novel, is brutal and gory. Cutting open one of the infested, Fran finds “squirming tumors that flinched from her hunting knife and scalpel, hiding among bones and fleshy membranes like goldfish in the archways and battlements of an aquarium castle.” This is poetry in extremis. It’s also among the best in contemporary horror.
The genre is having a moment, whether it’s film (like Jordan Peele’s high-grossing Get Out), podcasts (such as the pop-supernatural Lore), or TV (including Netflix hits like The Haunting of Hill House). Publishers are taking notice with new imprints. Last fall, major sci-fi and fantasy publisher Tor Books—which put out Robert Jordan’s famed series The Wheel of Time, now an Amazon Prime show—launched a horror imprint, and Manhunt is one of the most talked-about titles in its lineup. (NPR called it “brilliantly imagined,” and Publisher’s Weekly admired how it “swings for the fences.”) Under its imprint Strange Light, Penguin Random House Canada started publishing horror novels in 2019, including David Demchuk’s Red X, in which a monster haunts and hunts Toronto’s Gay Village. (Demchuk’s 2017 horror debut, The Bone Mother, was a number-one bestseller on Amazon.) Farrar, Straus and Giroux has had major success with its line of FSG Originals, particularly Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi horror novel Annihilation, which was recently adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman. Literary prizes are also paying more attention. Stephen Graham Jones, a Blackfeet writer, won the 2021 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award for The Only Good Indians—a grisly supernatural revenge tale. Previous winners include literary luminaries Ocean Vuong and T. C. Boyle. Jones has been publishing since the early aughts; the wider culture is only now catching up.
