Gretchen Felker-Martin on Creating Successful Trans Horror
Gretchen Felker-Martin has already attracted a cult following with Manhunt. A book with all the splatterpunk trappings of Jack Ketchum spliced with the deadly, elegant edge of Caitlín R. Kiernan and the socio-political bent of Margaret Atwood, Manhunt is a genre-defying gallimaufry of monstrosity, cis-matriarchal orders, Trans/Queer warriors, estrogen harvesting, and dystopian cults. Packaged with more than enough violent grit, sex, and squirm-inducing shocks to appeal to even the most jaded of horror aficionados. The novel has been hailed by genre writers and critics alike as one of the finest novels published in years and the first mainstream horror novel from a trans female author. Not that we’d want to blow smoke up a writer’s ass, but with Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin has deftly earned her place alongside the forefathers of thought-provoking, cleverly crafted transgressive fare. Her writing sits (un)comfortably beside work from the likes of A.M Holmes, Joyce Carol Oates, Octavia Butler, and Kathy Acker.
In this interview, we talk intersectional politics colliding with transgressive horror, how Cronenbergian body horror informed Manhunt, monster metaphors, the end of the world, and fucking on J.K. Rowling’s grave…
Within the framework of post-apocalyptic horror, sociopolitical barometers are consistently and excessively measured through a cishet, white lens with the core concepts largely remaining the same in pop culture: family, male power structures, and heterosexism. Since its publication, Manhunt has made a significant cultural impact, did you expect it?
I expected pushback, which I’ve gotten, because of course transgender people are the current fascist wedge issue being employed to separate leftists and liberals/centrists, so just by being transgender and writing a book that doesn’t spend its entire length apologizing for our existence and explaining what we are in pastel baby food terms to a cis audience, there’s a lot of inherent friction. What I hoped was that the book would both challenge people and also that trans people would identify with it and feel seen by it, and it’s been very gratifying to watch that play out. Frankly, I’ve been in awe of the scale of the response. Tens of thousands of people reading something I never in a million years thought would be the thing that got me published. It’s humbling.
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Can you discuss the archetypal signifiers and character tropes that exist within horror fiction and how Manhunt subverts or/and dismantles them completely…
Well, horror is a tremendous genre, so I’ll confine myself to the things that are relevant to Manhunt in particular. In survival horror you have of course all these archetypes built around competence and physical prowess, sort of hunter archetypes, pragmatic leaders who’ll do anything to defend their little group of survivors, bad guys who are drunk on the power of this new really Balkanized world where you can exert a lot of control over a small subgroup of people. Manhunt has all of that, more or less, and where it deconstructs these archetypal images is that these people aren’t normative. They’re fat, they’re trans, they’re non-white, and so they have really differing experiences of the world around them both before and after its collapse, and where most survival horror kind of assumes that either diversity is now purely aesthetic or else has been totally erased (Jeff Barnaby’s movie Blood Quantum deconstructs this really smartly), Manhunt is about the structures of oppression and the psychological baggage of living as the Other outlasting even the literal fall of civilisation. You’re in the ashes of human life and people are still screaming at you for being an illegal immigrant, or a lesbian, or because you didn’t go to college. The indignity!
Intersectional politics collide with transgressive horror in Manhunt and your book is utterly uncompromising. Your writing sits (un)comfortably beside work from the likes of A.M Holmes, Joyce Carol Oates, Octavia Butler, and Kathy Acker.
Thought-provoking cleverly crafted transgressive writing with mainstream appeal. Do you think genre-centric material is legitimately subversive, or could the envelope be pushed a little more?
Thank you for putting me in company like that! I like to think Manhunt is a little grosser even than Oates’s horrible foot blisters, but still. I do think genre can be subversive, absolutely. Alien is a genre film, and a big part of its lasting power is that it forces men to sit with the active fear of being raped and impregnated. Stephen King’s IT is genre, and it’s a raw and honest book about extremely brutal child abuse that I think absolutely woke a lot of readers up to its ubiquity and intensity in American family life. Talking about suffering and abjection and violence in American art without attaching some kind of justifying or redemptive narrative to that is inherently subversive, I think because as a society we’re so invested in looking the other way. That said, we can always go harder, we can always push further. I want to do that with my work. Find the edge and probe at it, see what’s going on there.
The subgenre(s) of Cronenbergian body horror and Splattercore literature are huge influences for you. What are the key influences that fuelled the writing of Manhunt?
Well of course there’s Cronenberg, who I’ve loved my entire life, and Torrey Peters’ Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is a huge influence, as is Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree’s The Screwfly Solution. 28 Days Later, those gender politics swirled together with fascist militarism, and the bleakness and chaos of Children of Men. Maybe more than anything, though, you have my two horror dads: King and Barker. King especially, as someone growing up in New England and spending all my time in the woods, his books are very dear to me, and his love of the New England woodland comes through so strongly. I think a lot of that is present in Manhunt.
You have a pragmatic approach to writing about sex and sexuality, gender identity, and sexual violence. Any editorial pushback? Let’s be honest: prevailing attitudes (to sex in pop culture) would make us believe that vivisection is a more palatable pastime (to mainstream horror readers) than rimming!
My editor, Kelly O’Connor Lonesome, was really great to work with and gave me no pushback on any of the sex scenes, except I think she wanted to cut one between Ramona and Feather for a time, but I said I wanted to keep it and we ended up cutting something else. I think the only thing she really firmly wanted me to cut was a scene with forced impregnation via turkey baster and she was right — it was tacky, and that awful movie Don’t Breathe had already done it. I ended up replacing it with something way more grotesque, and she loved that.
“Trans people cannot be exterminated, we cannot be defeated, and in sixty years we’ll be snorting ketamine off Rowling’s headstone and fucking on her grave. You can take that to the bank.”
Historically, having sex (or the focus on sexuality as the subject matter) in horror usually had an agenda-driven motive, and was utilized as an intellectual device, sci-fi conceit, or morality play. In Manhunt people having sex is antithetical to the horror happening around them. It might be a first…
Well I think King, who does sometimes get moralistic about sex, has a long track record of people fucking on the brink of oblivion, taking comfort in each other that way, and of course, Barker has no moral lessons for us in even his most grotesquely sexual stories like Jacqueline S: Her Will and Testament, but I take your point. In Manhunt they’re having sex because what else are you going to do? You can’t go to the movies. You can’t go see the Sox play. Life is unrelentingly frightening and terrible, and sex pushes back against that and defies it, or at least gives you something to cling to.
In Manhunt, monstrosity is about context, how we frame it, and who dictates the parameters. You’ve taken anti-trans rhetoric to genocidal extremes in the novel. Do you hope the book will convey to a wider audience how dangerous The TERF movement really is?
I think we live in a world where anti-trans rhetoric is at a genocidal extreme right now. In the past eight months, we’ve seen Lily Cade, Mark Burns, and others openly advocate for the legal and extralegal killing of trans women and, in Burns’s case, other queer people. We’re seeing legislation pushed all over America the goal of which is to isolate trans people from each other, deprive us of our hormones, and torture us medically and socially. And of course, there’s this emergent panic over “groomers”, which is an incoherent fascist dog whistle for all queer people, especially trans women and gay men, which is absolutely being deployed as a groundwork for mass murder and stochastic terrorism.
I think the book might reach a few people in that way, wake them up to what TERFs and their Hard Right allies are doing, but it’s not going to change minds. It’s not going to make people who are okay with genocide suddenly not okay with it. America has been genocidal literally from the moment of its inception, and people — mostly white people, queers included — don’t challenge it because to do that we’d have to admit that our comfort is built on brutality and bloodshed. A book can’t flip the switch on that. I wouldn’t write something trying to do that; it’s futile, and Leftist organizers have been working much more effectively to build coherent resistance to fascism than artists ever could.
Horror has a bad reputation for othering queerness and calling it progress. From Buffy to True Blood To In The Flesh, Trans/queer and gender non-conforming people have been camouflaged in Monster Metaphor or Queer Coded in a minor/major way.
You’ve side-stepped this with ease by creating fully human, flawed characters who screw up, fuck, fight and live their lives without these once-ubiquitous political underpinnings. Did it prove difficult?
Well, I want to say, for the record, I am a huge fan of queer-coded monsters and villains, and of monsters which sublimate anxieties about sexuality, etc. In The Hellbound Heart, the cenobites definitely represent queerness and leather culture, this forbidden, dangerous, and enticing demimonde you can seek out or stumble upon by accident, and you have wonderful queer characters like Mrs. Danvers from du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, who is psychosexually obsessed with this aristocrat she raised from birth and tended to all her life — these are powerful figures in art, and I see my work as very much in conversation with that kind of craft around queerness.
We are outsiders, and I don’t want to assimilate, I don’t want to be like everyone else. I just want the world to leave me and my fellow freaks the hell alone. So, no, I don’t think it felt particularly difficult to sketch out this whole world of queer people, because that’s what my life is like. I think I have… exactly two straight friends? Everyone else in my life is trans and/or queer, and we’re all messes, and we have a lot of sex and do stupid things and love each other as we can. It came naturally to write about people like that.
The Cuckoo is out next year and has a Jack Finney/Ira Levin vibe…Or am I wrong?
You’re not wrong! I had Rosemary’s Baby very much in mind when I wrote it, as well as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s a shapeshifter/doppelganger story about queer kids who get sent to a conversion therapy camp in the mid-90s, and I’m very very excited to see what people make of it.
Any last words, Gretchen?
Well first let me thank you for your questions, which were a blast to answer, and second let me say that trans people cannot be exterminated, we cannot be defeated, and in sixty years we’ll be snorting ketamine off Rowling’s headstone and fucking on her grave. You can take that to the bank.
Words: Alan Kelly
