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A review by argonautical
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
0.5
This book wouldn’t know subtlety if it was beat over the head with it. The concept was solid so I stuck through it in hopes that maybe it would get better but I really should’ve called it quits after the first 20 pages.
There’s such a reliance on shock value that in the end nothing is shocking because you’re just numb to everything going on. A cycle of one gruesome thing happening and moving on to the next while waiting for some semblance of a plot to appear and it never does. Simultaneously the book thinks it’s so clever with its inclusion of modern gender politics into its post-apocalyptic dystopia but you can’t be clever when everything is presented at face value, no nuance to any characters, no depth, just a shallow portrayal of gender in which the villains of the book are caricatured in how one-dimensional their ideals are (there seriously wasn’t anything more creative to call them than TERFs? That is what they are but cmon, you had free rein to unleash creativity, call them anything, anything at all, and you chose the default option, in this a fictional world in which internet-origin lingo is gonna stick out like a sore thumb as feeling incredibly out of place).
There’s no commentary of value added by the author on the themes (if we can even call surface-level discussion that) she chose to include so it serves only as a preach to the choir instead of allowing any delving into what we could understand about our society’s treatment of trans people and gender identity as a whole through the lens of this world she created. An opportunity to say something of value absolutely wasted.
The blurb labels it horror while the acknowledgements labels it splattercore. It fails at horror given the thematics are so surface-level and shock-value driven with the same cheap shocks cycled over and over that it’s impossible to feel anything but bored. Despite the prevalence of violence it fails to be splattercore either because, again, I feel nothing. It’s like the author thinks just including various traumas inherently creates horror or dread but completely forgets how important it is to add a coherent story to the mix so that readers actually have something to care about. “This thing happened and then this thing happened” is not a compelling story.
There is no development to any character, and we learn very little about any of them. And yet instead of a plot we spend the whole time following random events involving these characters we don’t know enough about to care for, often in a confusing fashion of sudden perspective changes without proper indication of who we’re following now. All wrapped up in run on sentences and cluttered paragraphs that often make it a chore to parse what’s being written.
I spent 20¢ on this book secondhand and that was still too much.
There’s such a reliance on shock value that in the end nothing is shocking because you’re just numb to everything going on. A cycle of one gruesome thing happening and moving on to the next while waiting for some semblance of a plot to appear and it never does. Simultaneously the book thinks it’s so clever with its inclusion of modern gender politics into its post-apocalyptic dystopia but you can’t be clever when everything is presented at face value, no nuance to any characters, no depth, just a shallow portrayal of gender in which the villains of the book are caricatured in how one-dimensional their ideals are (there seriously wasn’t anything more creative to call them than TERFs? That is what they are but cmon, you had free rein to unleash creativity, call them anything, anything at all, and you chose the default option, in this a fictional world in which internet-origin lingo is gonna stick out like a sore thumb as feeling incredibly out of place).
There’s no commentary of value added by the author on the themes (if we can even call surface-level discussion that) she chose to include so it serves only as a preach to the choir instead of allowing any delving into what we could understand about our society’s treatment of trans people and gender identity as a whole through the lens of this world she created. An opportunity to say something of value absolutely wasted.
The blurb labels it horror while the acknowledgements labels it splattercore. It fails at horror given the thematics are so surface-level and shock-value driven with the same cheap shocks cycled over and over that it’s impossible to feel anything but bored. Despite the prevalence of violence it fails to be splattercore either because, again, I feel nothing. It’s like the author thinks just including various traumas inherently creates horror or dread but completely forgets how important it is to add a coherent story to the mix so that readers actually have something to care about. “This thing happened and then this thing happened” is not a compelling story.
There is no development to any character, and we learn very little about any of them. And yet instead of a plot we spend the whole time following random events involving these characters we don’t know enough about to care for, often in a confusing fashion of sudden perspective changes without proper indication of who we’re following now. All wrapped up in run on sentences and cluttered paragraphs that often make it a chore to parse what’s being written.
I spent 20¢ on this book secondhand and that was still too much.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Deadnaming, Death, Drug use, Fatphobia, Gore, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicide, Torture, Transphobia, Blood, Cannibalism, Dysphoria, and Pandemic/Epidemic