Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Content Tags: Horror, LGBTQIA+, Descriptive Sex Scenes, Murder, Post-Apocalyptic, Violence, Sexual Assault, Rape, Torture, Self-Harm, Trauma, Transphobia, Bigotry

Description from Storygraph:

Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they’ll never face the same fate.

Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren’t safe.

After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics—all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.

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Horror is not my usual go-to genre for any media consumption. Life is horrific enough. But the cover of this book showed up a few times on my social media feeds, and I could not resist. That's my kind of book cover. (Yes, I know... "don't judge a book by its cover." Too bad - I did it.)

Overall, I understand this book was horror because of the post-apocalyptic aspect to the story, but I really was expecting a lot worse. All the horrors in this book are real world horrors with a bit of a new twist and flare to it. (Like I said, life is horrific.) Some of the more "gruesome" scenes I even found a bit funny. I'm not sure if that was the authors intent, but it felt to me as if there was a bit of (I'm probably using this word wrong) satirical humor to some of the scenes. The first scene of harvesting organs was one of these moments for me where I couldn't help but laugh.

I enjoyed the development of the story and the various characters, though it could've been made into a series and had even more development and time spent at the different phases of the plot. The ending didn't feel very resolved for me, but maybe that's an unrealistic expectation with this type of book. Since I'm more familiar with YA books, I tend to get a nice conclusion. But this is dystopian horror, so... probably make sense it ended without really resolving anything.

Along that line, another element I was not expecting since it doesn't happen much (at all) in YA books was very descriptive sex scenes. Like... very descriptive and detailed. (At least to me as is about to be explained.) Personally, I don't think these scenes add anything to the plot because they don't feel realistic to me. However, I'm exceedingly biased in this regard because I'm asexual, so I don't understand the... impulse? Desire? Compulsion? I don't know. If you are put off by sex scenes maybe don't read this. But I think the author wrote them well and I did appreciate the variety of different body parts and such represented with multiple trans characters. Such a great way to include the elements that not all parts belong to the assumed gender and having certain parts doesn't mean anything about who you are.

This genre still isn't entirely for me, but I did enjoy this book on the whole.

To wrap up:

What surprised you most about the book?

As noted above, the sex scenes. I am never prepared - especially in a "the whole world is on fire" type book - for these scenes sprinkled in. I kind of always assumed those scenes were reserved for "romance" books. (I am well aware this is totally a me thing. lol)

Would you ever consider re-reading it? Why or why not?

Probably not. The genre is not really my thing, so reading it once was likely sufficient for me.