By Eric Shorey
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of Twitter is the way that it creates a sort of secondary superego in the mind of its most voracious users. In its most classic formulation, the superego is a sort of internalized memorial to the Oedipus complex: it is the voice of the Father which threatens punishment should a moral boundary be crossed. The superego is usually thought of as a kind of persecutory voice that harasses and harangues the ego and the id into obedience.
In the age of the terminally connected, it’s easy to see how the persecutory voice of Twitter — the relentless and hate-filled onslaught of opinions from strangers — creates a new kind of internalized fanaticism. Suddenly, one must consider the opinions of the anonymous masses before speaking — suddenly, everyone is afraid of retribution from people they’ve never met.
Manhunt, a 2022 horror novel written by Gretchen Felker-Martin, depicts a post-apocalyptic United States infested by rabid, cannibalistic rape-zombies. The gimmick of the book is that this unique form of hyper-sexual monstrosity only manifests in people with testosterone in their bodies: the last survivors of the plauge are cis women, trans women, a few non-binaries, and a few trans men.
Manhunt depicts a world where Twitter — well, the entire Internet — is gone. But Twitter, specifically, haunts every character. It shows up in their reminisces about the before-times, they recall arguments and retweeted conversations amidst battles against the ferocious post-men, they remember memes in the middle of sex.
Felker-Martin’s hellish world is a kind of Twitter discourse come to life. At a time when Christo-fascist evangelicals are attempting to legislate trans lives out of existence, one could take a quick look at “the discourse” on Twitter and mistakenly think that cis women and trans women were in some kind of cosmic war against each other. But the bigger problem was always — and has always been — men.
In a book ostensibly about the monstrosities of masculinity, the rape-zombies become almost an afterthought amidst the ideological and literal bloody battles between the TERFs and the trans protagonists — a dramatization of the kinds of hyper-moralistic fights that play out in replies and mega-verbose, multi-tweet threads.
Maybe there’s something on-the-nose about that, but it rings as oddly insightful in a dystopian way: that rather than choosing to help each other survive, these warring factions decide to tear each other apart rather than tackle the obvious problem in front of them: men! All these categories of identity that promised liberatory potentiality have instead become cudgels to wield against each other: the narcissism of small differences weaponized on an apocalyptic scale.
There’s a lot of talk about Justice on Twitter, but after years of us all enduring that site’s hideous content, it’s become clear that this style of communicating doesn’t have anything to do with Justice at all — and is almost entirely illegible to the bulk of the country that isn’t extremely online. Manhunt depicts a universe where all the conversations about survival, Justice, and sisterhood suddenly have much higher stakes than they did before doomsday.
One can’t be sure if Felker-Martin is offering us this alternate future as a sort of extrapolation of the battles she finds herself engaged in online or if the book is meant to serve as a critique of “the discourse” itself — or both. (I’m told that Felker-Martin is quite the power-Tweeter, but I haven’t investigated her posting habits because I would prefer the text of her novel speak for itself.)
The most glaring example of this dynamic is in the novel’s final battle scene, during which a character suddenly remembers Twitter arguments about whether or not sex should be allowed at Pride, and angrily declares, to no one in particular, “Of course it fucking does.” Even after the world has ended, she still finds herself in these insane internally rehearsed arguments about things that could no longer even exist.
Manhunt succeeds magnificently in giving a much needed updated twist to the zombie genre, and its literary merits are far greater than the novels and movies it is riffing on. The author’s ability to capture the internal worlds of the beleaguered characters — balanced with excellently written, heart-stopping action sequences (I literally gasped several times while reading!) — is astonishing compared to the unending assault of mediocre zombie media like The Walking Dead, World War Z, and endless Dawn of the Dead remakes. Even if you’re not interested in all the gender politics, the book functions perfectly well as genre fiction. There’s even a few fun intertextual easter eggs throughout, like the zombifying disease being known as the T-Virus: a play on the nickname trans men use for their hormones, but also a nod to Resident Evil. And Felker-Martin makes sure never to use the Z-word in her book at all — a classic zombie fiction trope!
The lore of Manhunt is also intriguing in a purely nerdy way: there’s an interesting little aside about Ivanka Trump and Nancy Pelosi fighting for power as the world’s government collapses. And the monsters themselves are notably nasty — especially the detail that if a woman is impregnated by a T-Rex, the baby will eat its way out of the mother after two months. And in less than a year after that, the infected infant reaches sexual maturity.
Felker-Martin also succeeds in painting a picture of her protagonists that struck me as almost painfully honest, with a kind of caustic verisimilitude. In other words: her main characters are all kind of annoying, but in a way that is totally realistic. Her passages that depict the marginal, stridently anti-capitalist lives of the trans girls before the apocalypse were particularly poignant and sad: one of the main themes of the novel is the ways that trans people in particular can be extraordinarily vicious towards each other, and Felker-Martin shows this through flashbacks of her girls making elaborate, Twitter-brained critiques of each others’ politics that serve as thinly-veiled projections of their own insecurities and traumas. There was something brutally truthful and brutally vulnerable about these excerpts that hurt me more than the actual, extreme violence depicted in the book’s more gory moments. Despite or because of this, I found myself teary-eyed when any of the main characters ultimately met their demise.
Felker-Martin has an amazing ability to depict and describe queer sexuality, and there was something both shockingly refreshing and totally normal about her referring to the characters’ trans anatomy with sensitivity to their pronouns: she both lovingly and scornfully describes “her cock” and “his cunt” in sex scenes that depict extremely intricate, interpersonal dynamics filled with resentment, desire, jealousy, eroticism, and pure terror.
The least shocking element of reading Manhunt was encountering a book with no cis male characters at all. They simply weren’t missed, and the emotional complexity of the story without them (except for their presence as a snarling, rotting horde) shows that cis men needn’t be the center of every story, despite what the canonical history of literature and horror has depicted.
FINAL JUDGEMENT: A-
(By the way: the audiobook version of Manhunt is especially magnificent and Katherine Pucciariello deserves kudos for her incredible performance as the story’s narrator.)