Reviews with content warning for Medical content - Manhunt

Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

126 reviews

brynalexa's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Full disclosure: I don’t generally read horror.

This book was disgusting, perfect, challenging, and relatable, unfortunately. Not for the faint of heart but absolutely worth it if you can get through the gore 🏳️‍⚧️

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cynicalplankton's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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scarletranger's review against another edition

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I'll start with the things that made me want to continue to give this book a chance, long after I probably should have stopped. Felker-Martin is great at descriptions. She can paint a vivid, disturbing picture like no other, and her action sequences are top-notch.

However, that doesn't make the writing solid. Even given the unique genre, things like similar sentence structures, bland, one-dimensional characters, and an over-reliance of forcing the message down the reader's throat make this an unenjoyable experience. And as someone who identifies as non-binary, the message of "all cis-het people suck!" is just as harmful as the reverse.

The worst offense, though, is that in the writer's anger (and it's clear that she wrote this out of anger), she somehow found a way to make TERF's hatred make sense? For context: this is a world where anyone with too much testosterone turns into a zombie that rapes, kills, and eats anyone they smell estrogen on. Trans-women have to find ways to keep getting estrogen, or else they are doomed to the same fate.

In a zombie apocalypse, it would be dangerous and stupid to harbor someone with a bite simply because you don't want to seem like a bigot. Why, then, should TERFs allow trans-women into their compounds, to live near their groups, when at any moment they could turn into the dreaded man? TERFs are some of the worst scum on earth, and yet this book makes their fears and hatred legitimate.

It doesn't help that one of the main characters (a trans-woman) immediately starts fantasizing about raping the TERFs the moment she sees them because she's so horny, all the time. When this book isn't preaching at you, it's throwing rough sex in your face with no lead-up. Just a "Wanna fuck?" and there they go! Whether that's because of the genre or poor character-building, I don't know.

This book was clearly written in anger. If the author had any joy in this project, it would have been the sadistic glee of saying "all men are murderous rapists just waiting for an excuse" and being able to make them suffer. At least, that's how it reads, and that experience sucks.

To any writers out there: when you try to force your message too hard, not only does it feel like you're talking down to the reader, it leaves you open to "proving the point" of whoever you're opposing. And that can offer dangerous ammunition. This is a book TERFs could easily hold high and say, "Look! Even they know we're right! They're dangerous and should be kept away from us." And that is one of the worst things a book can do: hurt the very people it claims to represent.

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apolloann's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This was a hard book to read, but wow, was it great. With just enough humor sprinkled in to make the horror digestible, Manhunt left me feeling deeply unsettled. I'm newer to the horror genre, so this was a lot to handle, but the story and characters were so beautifully written that it made the discomfort worth it.

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f18's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I figured this would be the best bet for a ~~gender~~ ~~chromosome~~ hormone apocalypse depiction that I could get behind, and it did address all the stuff that irks me about other versions (discusses how it affects trans people ofc, but also things like pcos). Unfortunately I didn't really find myself immersed in the writing but I'm not 100% sure why. I guess the style didn't click with me or maybe because it didn't focus as much on aspects of the genre I most connect to, like body horror.

I constantly kept losing track of which POV the story was in at any time. I attributed this to the narrator not pausing long enough between scene breaks, but I see that has come up in reviews of the physical book as well. I think the character voices (not the narrator's but the author's ) blurred together.

There's just something about the metaphor of

trans women surviving by eating cis men's testes

that is just so interesting but yeah... the book was okay, but I didn't love it like I was hoping for.

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bonni24's review

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For the first 70 or so pages, this was a fairly interesting book. After entering into the second section of the book, the plot becomes somewhat stagnant. There are also a lot more changes in perspective in the middle of the chapters and some of the sections in a certain perspective were quite brief.

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