Ep. 47 Gretchen Felker-Martin - MANHUNT
      
Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is writer, film critic, and “filthcore queen” Gretchen Felker-Martin. A self-described professional cenobite, Gretchen writes about sexual revulsion, body horror, and how violence forms and fits into our lives. In addition to her fiction and essays available on Patreon, she has written criticism for outlets like Polygon, FanByte, The Outline, and Nylon.


This past February, Gretchen made her traditional publishing debut with Manhunt, a novel that follows two trans women trying to survive in a world ravaged by a testosterone-targeting plague. It is a brutal, gruesome exploration of gender, power, and violence at the end of the world — and on a personal note, it is the best book I’ve read all year.


Gretchen Felker-Martin, welcome to Story Behind the Story.


Gretchen Felker-Martin (GFM): God! Thank you for that introduction, Clara. That's so flattering!


(CSA): It’s not flattering. If it's true, right?


(GFM): Well, I'll take that. It's a real pleasure to be here. 


(CSA): Thank you and I'm really delighted to have you here. 
So, Manhunt opens on Beth: a trans woman raising her boat to shoot a monstrous new man drinking from a pool in a forest. You stated that this was the first image you came up with for the novel, and that everything else sprung from there. Tell me about this image/; What does it evoke for you? 


(GFM): Well, when I was a kid I spent most of my time in the New Hampshire forests. We lived right on the edge of one in a tiny little town of 600 people, and I would take my dog Tucker and just wander around for hours and hours. This kind of place — like the one Beth is crouched in — that was my favorite place in the world to be. Somewhere where the canopy opened up, and there was standing water and you could kneel down and watch newts swim between the dead leaves, and just see this whole world that had no idea that you existed — or that anything you'd ever thought was important existed or mattered at all. That was very calming to me when I was little. So I think about the woods a lot (even as a much more indoorsy adult) and it was what initially captivated me, was this story that was set primarily in the woods and countryside of New England. And of course, as anyone who's grown up in or around the woods can tell you, it's not uniformly a safe place for a kid to play. I grew up at a time when parenting in my part of the world was a lot more permissive than it seems to be now, and we had a lot more time and leeway to just roam around however we wanted. But I ran into dangerous animals more than once; I stayed out too long and got stuck in the woods after dark more than once. There's nothing quite like being afraid in the woods because suddenly you are back where you've spent 100,000 years evolving away from. 


(CSA): It's very primal. 


(GFM): And it’s like you never left! You know, that screaming, nonverbal ape is still right there in the back of your brain telling you that you're about to get eaten by a bear.


(CSA): Yeah. There's something I really liked about this image, too (that I have no idea if you were going for), but it really evoked the myth of Diana the Huntress.


(GFM): Yeah!


(CSA): — and it set up for me this way of thinking about Beth and Fran (who is the other main character trans woman in this story, who is frequently described as being smaller and more delicate, and basically more able to assimilate) as like the Artemis/Aphrodite conflict that you see frequently in Greek myth. 


(GFM): That's not something that was on the tip of my brain or anything, but I see it.


(CSA): It made it for me — I mean, the whole thing is fascinating for a wide variety of reasons — but there's something really interesting to me in the ways those things can get rooted in other stories, right? Like, the stories themselves that we tell about the woods are primal too.


(GFM): Right. And those archetypes are still echoing thousands and thousands of years later, and are still so much at the heart of how women come into conflict with each other. 


(CSA): Yeah. Yeah, very much so. I think that that's a good transition to my next question, which is that the meat of this novel is in the conflict between trans women like Beth and Fran, and the fascist — and quite literally militant — TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) who want to fill the power void created by this plague with violence and with control, and with a very violent ideology. How did you get from the initial image of Beth shooting this new man to that central conflict? 


(GFM): When I started with that image, the first thing that I had to figure out was: well, why is she hunting him? Aside from, obviously, ‘one less of these things in the world.’ And that led me to my idea that they were hunting them for the estrogen that's naturally stored in testicles; and that led me to thinking about this world's economy and what was important after the collapse of paper money and credit — the entire financial institution as we know it. Which all inevitably leads to the question of: what happens when anywhere between 60 and 99% of every form of government in the entire country turns into a monster?


(CSA): Yeah.
 
(GFM): And a type of monster that can't think or make decisions. And I think what we've seen over the past half century is that it wouldn't change a lot in terms of what women do when you give them power. We're living in this horrible era of “Girl Boss” politics where the mere proximity of a woman to power is considered this big empowering feminist thing, and it's completely hollow. It's meaningless. The only thing that changes is whose hand is on the button. In the end, some Pakistani kids’ wedding is still getting blown up. 


(CSA): Actually, as you were saying that I was thinking that one of the ridiculous, meaningless, targeting negative Goodreads reviews that I saw, the username was ‘Girl Boss 9000’ or something. (They laugh) I was like: Yeah, that fits.
I think that is one of the things that is so fascinating about this novel — and I think about a lot of horror, in general. In creating these physical monsters — these outlandish monsters — it reveals all the monsters who were there the entire time.


(GFM): Right. You break the context and then the reader's forced to re-examine. 


(CSA): Yeah. So tell me about the three main characters: Beth, Fran, and Robbie. Who are they, and where did they come from for you? 


(GFM): Well, in some respects, they're derived from people I know, and in some respects, they’re little constructs suited to the story around them. The way that I see writing: it's a discipline, and making up a character is part of the discipline. First you learn your archetypes, you immerse yourself in fiction. I read a lot. I watch a ton of movies. And so you can start to assemble the image of a person pretty easily after a while. You think, ‘okay they'll have these traits, and they'll look like this, and they'll evoke this for the reader,’ (you know, depending on their life experiences) and so I thought that they would make a good trio. They embody the things that I wanted to talk about: traditional femininity, despised femininity, and manhood in a world where manhood is literally poisonous.


(CSA): In their interactions, you see tensions in all three arms of this triangle. What do you see as the central tensions between each of them?


(GFM): I think that their central tension is how they want to exist in the world. Fran struggles with the desire to pass unnoticed, to have the body that she longs for — which is a very understandable desire. She's living in a world where everything that she thought she would have eventually has been ripped away, and her dream of being some kind of “normie” beautiful trophy wife is gone all of a sudden. Beth, I think, would mostly like to be left alone. She wants to be seen and valued and loved as a woman. She wants to stop having to fight for everything and fight everyone to get them to see her the way that she is inside. And for Robbie, so much of it is tied up in the death of his friend Midge at the start of the plague, that she ran out of spironolactone. They had no idea how to suppress her testosterone levels and so she got the plague, and he had to kill her. And this has just driven him away from other people completely. And so what he's navigating is the tension between desperately wanting to reconnect with people and living in fear of opening himself up to that pain again.


(CSA): I want to talk about one more character: Ramona, who is an officer in a TERF militia by day, while spending her nights with a trans sex worker. You wrote a wonderful piece for Autostraddle on the experience of getting into Ramona's head for the novel and I want to briefly quote you on this. You said, “With Ramona I wanted to show someone who takes the easy way out of personal conflicts, who doesn't honor or respect the people she loves or desires when those feelings run up against hard questions, who fails in ways we've all failed, but in a situation with much higher stakes. I wanted the people reading her perspective to feel the way I do when I lay awake at night and think about the times in my life that I failed, that I've said something cruel or ignorant or hateful, that I've let myself and others down, that I willfully ignored the cost of my place in the world. I guess that's the other reason it's so hard to write about a TERF — It pushed me to dwell on my own complicity in every exploitative system upon which modern American society rests.” I love that description of Ramona for a lot of reasons, but particularly because it underlines some ways in which Ramona, in her drive to just ignore conflict and and ignore her place in the world and just seek out safety and personal gain; The ways in which there are some similarities between the effects of her actions and what happens with Fran. They're both trying to stay under the radar and avoiding conflict at the expense of people they love. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that comparison and that relationship between Ramona and Fran?


(GFM): Yeah, they are meant to be very much parallel, and they wind up closely entwined as the story goes on. To me, they are quintessential examples of ‘go along to get along’ types, and while with Ramona that takes a militarized, outwardly violent form; Fran is more complicit in violent systems in the way that white women have traditionally been complicit in those systems in our society. Through her tears, through her passivity, through her unwillingness to confront what her life as a beautiful woman is built on. She enthusiastically integrates herself into life in the bunker in the middle act of the book because it offers her this chance to go back as some normality — and she's even willing to expose herself to being dehumanized and used as a sex toy because those things will eventually reaffirm the place in society that she wants. And Ramona is the same way; She allows herself to be used as an instrument of violence, to be used as a as an executioner.


(CSA): Yeah.


(GFM): Because it would just be too hard to come up with something else to do. Her friends would be mad at her. (They both giggle) Ramona, I think, has the exact morality of a college frat guy who you can get to do pretty much anything by making bok-bok-bok-bok-bok (mimicking a chicken) noises at him.
 
(CSA): It's funny and it's ridiculous when you say it that way, but it's also very true, right? There are so many people like that in the world. There are so many people for whom it is just easier not to examine what they're doing and what the costs are, even when that means turning a blind eye to great injustice. 


(GFM): Right. It's the moral laziness on which our society is built. 


(CSA): You mentioned the bunker a second ago, and I'm wondering if, just briefly, you could describe what that is, and what the different locations in the world of Manhunt are, and what they're representing. 


(GFM): Well, you open with the wilderness where we get to know these characters in a vacuum as they journey back towards what's left of their civilization. And to me, this is the simplest part of the book: they're trying to survive. You get to see who they are under pressure. You get to see how their connection operates in a vacuum and then you move on to the bunker, which is this place of compromises and assimilation and poisoned promises and silent violence. It’s modern society. It’s living in a luxury apartment while people panhandle outside, literally. And that gives you the opportunity to recontextualize these people as they're being given these extremely hard personal choices to make, and to see how the allure of supposed safety can motivate even good people to do terrible things. 


(CSA): Yeah, and that's one character we haven't talked about, but who is very relevant to how they end up in the bunkers: Indi. She's Beth's lover, she is a (it seems like) a doctor in the world before who —


(GFM): Yeah, she's the fertility specialist. 


(CSA): Right. And so she is extracting and refining estrogen for a wide variety of people; And I found her journey really interesting, too, because she takes them to the bunker out of fear that Fran and Beth are going to be discovered by the TERFs who are overtaking the area that they live in, and so much of it is her slow realization that it was entirely the wrong choice. 


(GFM): Yeah, and that there was no right choice to make. Yeah, Indi is put in a situation where her medical ethics and her morals and her relationships are all in conflict with one another, which is the situation that I think a lot of people are frequently put into in the real world. And you make mistakes in those situations. You do things that hurt other people. You get involved in ugly, ugly systems of power. Anyone who's ever been in medicine or social work will tell you that peer pressure and law and any number of other forces have compelled them to do things that haunt them for the rest of their lives. 


(CSA): We've been talking a lot about different ways in which this book explores ideas of safety and assimilation and ‘going along to get along’ (to make it even simpler in that way), and I think one of the things that I appreciate most about this book is the way that morality is not binary here. There are so many complicated choices that people are always navigating, but you set up this hyper vigilance around the new men in the world — who are these monsters who you literally have to guard against, but it creates this awareness of this hyper vigilance that you have to have around morality and your values. Like, there are no easy answers. You have to constantly be interrogating things 


(GFM): I think a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction is very focused on the violent struggle for survival, and they're a lot of reasons for that which range from good old “action/adventure,” to, like, a crypto fascist ethos where suddenly any transgression is excused because you're defending the survival of the species. In Manhunt, I wanted to turn around; to say that well, okay: once you've got your perimeter up, you have to deal with the people inside it. You have to re-form society, and naturally you're going to take the path of least resistance on almost every count which means you're going to recreate the painful, humiliating, degrading systems that we employ to interact with one another today. 


(CSA): I think about that a lot in our current world. I remember reading Carmen Maria Machado's memoir In the Dream House —


(GFM): Ooh man.


(CSA): Yeah, brutal and wonderful. (She chuckles)


(GFM): Yeah, that book laid me out flat.
 
(CSA): And just thinking about the way… the thing that got me most about it was the way so many of the people in her life — including a large number of queer people — wanted her to just shut up about the abuse that she'd been through, because of the fear of how it would make queer people look. And it goes back to some of those assimilationist instincts, right? You know: ‘We just need to be the model minority,’ ‘We just need to do what we're told.’ You almost don't need the oppressors. The, like, actual oppressors —


(GFM): No, you don't. We're perfectly capable of policing and brutalizing each other. 


(CSA): Yeah.


(GFM): Yeah, there's been a tremendous amount of lesbian intimate partner violence that has gone very quiet throughout modern history, and I'm I'm sure throughout history in general. Women are really not fundamentally different from men in any way. 


(CSA): It's so interesting to me because so many of those TERF-y critiques that I've seen of your book are that it's misogynist and that's just wild to me. You can only say that if you're coming from a gender essentialist point of view, which to me is fundamentally misogynist.


(GFM): Yeah I think, in as much as I'm interested in picking apart TERFs stupid incoherent ideology, really what they're operating from is this 1950s housewives idea of what it means to be a woman, combined with the horrible New age/spiritual awakening/Earth mother shit from the '70s, and the result is just so punishingly stupid. It's painful to study, because neither of those things is coherent. 


(CSA): Yeah, yeah! That idea that women are more peaceful and passive and nurturing and all of these things that —
(GFM): Right, as they scream this at you send you death threats.


{AD BREAK}


CSA: If you’re just joining me, my guest today is writer and film critic Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose traditional publishing debut, Manhunt, follows two trans women as they try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with testosterone monsters and TERFs.
So maybe now it's a good time to have you read.
 
(GFM): Oh yeah, I would be happy to!


(CSA): Can you set it up for us first — let us know what you’re going to be reading? 


(GFM): I'll be reading from the 6th chapter of the book: Bow String. Or, actually — I think it’s the 7th. Fran and Beth are in the wilderness headed back to Seabrook, New Hampshire, and they've just spent the night in an abandoned house. 


[She begins to read]
"They woke early the next morning and ate smoked fish and hard acornbread (which which tasted like shit) from the strangers supplies, as the fingers of pale sunlight coming through the moth eaten drapes crept across the carpet. Afterward, Fran repacked the duffle, kneeling in front of it to rearrange its contents. 
Beth tried not to look at the smooth tan skin between the other woman's shorts and t-shirt. She tried not to think about the freckles on Fran’s back, or the fine corn silk hairs of the nape of her neck. “You make me feel so delicate,” the other woman had said.
Beth ran her thumb absently over the bloodstained gauze taped to her cheek. The cuts still hurt, but it no longer throbbed, and the ridge of scabbed over flesh beneath is only warm to the touch — not burning with infectious fever. She always scarred like that, as though her body had known ahead of time it was going to be torn open. As though it was prepared from mutilation. 
The scar at the corner of her mouth pulling her face into a sardonic leer, the deep cut across the bridge of her nose (still scabby but stiffening fast under its soil Band-Aid). And of course the checkerboard razor cuts on her upper thighs that once upon a time had brought her so much hell. 
“You think [unintelligible] going to give that scholarship to a head case?” 
A dish broken against the wall, the red smear of spaghetti sauce on the yellowing wallpaper like blood.
“You’re throwing your fucking life away.”
They had, in the end, given that headcase a scholarship. And they hadn't pulled it until sophomore year when everything came out — her, namely, but also the thing with the coach. She could still remember how gently he touched her, the glistening trails of his tears down his windburn cheeks. 
She put the thought from her mind and cleared her throat, glancing over to where Fran was still rifling through the duffle. “Oh bellhop,” she drawled, “how's it going with those bags?” The crack of a gunshot cut Fran's answer short. The other girl's eyes widened. ‘It's a rifle,’ Beth thought as she scrambled for her bow, propped against the near arm of the rotting sofa. It's not far, half a mile. She hefted it, saw the frayed fibers bristling from the string near its lower v-hook. She thought of the mice she’d heard in the night, of their sharp little teeth at work on the wax string while she slept just a few yards away. Her thoughts raced as she buckled on her quiver. The screaming started before the gunshots echos faded, high and cold and somehow unmistakably randy — like a pack of Tex Avery cartoon wolves bugging their eyes out and stamping their feet.
“Fran,” said Beth, backing away from the window, the door, the rotten membrane of the outer wall. It seemed all of a sudden so pitifully fragile. Her mouth was dry. It was hard to talk about a whisper. “Fran I need you to help me restring the bow, now. We need to do it now.” Fran stared up at her, uncomprehending. The screaming grew louder, closer. Beth stood the bow upright, forcing herself to breathe. ‘You don't have time to freak out,’ she told herself. ‘You have to restring this fucking thing. You have to restring it before the men are here.’
“The socket wrench,” she said.
Fran’s mouth hung open. “What?”
“This is not the fucking time to make a point about how femme you are,” Beth snarled, squatting in front of the staircase with the bow stood on end between her thighs. “Get me the socket wrench from the duffle’s front pocket, then get the spare string and wax it. Now.” 
Fran bent over, shoulders hunched, and fished the duffel for what felt like half an hour before passing Beth the wrench. Beth loosened the bow's limb bolts one at a time. First the lower, then the upper. She tried not to think about what would happen if the arm snapped straight; 300 foot pounds of force per inch, give or take. It would be like getting slapped by a grizzly bear. She'd be lucky if it only broke her collar bone or an arm. ‘Maybe it'll kill me,’ she thought, fitting the wrenches head to the upper bolt again. Her palms were sweaty. She paused to wipe them on her shirt. ‘Then I'd have nothing to worry about.’ 
The floor began to shake. The windows rattled. The screams were getting closer. Beth loosened the lower bolt by a second turn. Fran, sitting on the stairs, had found the polyethylene replacement string. She had one end pinned under her shoe and she was rubbing a hunk of wax along its length. Her breath coming in short panicky gasps; her cheeks were flushed, her brow glistening with sweat. Time seemed to pass in spastic flashes. 
‘Maybe they’ll go straight for the gunshot,’ Beth thought, knowing they wouldn’t. They'd smell girl funk and come right through the walls. She rose into a crouch, turning the bow parallel with the floor, and set her boot against the chewed and fraying string. “That's good enough,” she said to Fran, holding out her free hand as she slowly drew the bow to half extension, praying the old string wouldn't snap. “I need you to hook it.”
A low rumbling brunt came from outside the North windows. Something rubbed against the house like a bear scratching itself on a tree trunk, and let loose a long, inquisitive whine. Fran squatted beside Beth, her eyes wide, following the sound as it rounded the corner and moved closer down the East wall. All at once mice poured out from the rotten sofa, wriggling free of its fungus-covered cushions and disintegrating arms, scurrying from beneath its feted skirts. Fran pressed her knuckles to her mouth to muffle her squeal of distaste as she picked her way across the seething floor. Beth pulled up, shoulders burning with the strain. As the bow's arms bent inward, the cams squeaking. She spoke through gritted teeth, pitching her voice low. “You see where the dead string is anchored now? Those arrowhead shaped hooks attached to the cams?” 
Fran, on her knees beside Beth looked up at her in bewilderment, tears welling in her big brown eyes. “The what?”
‘I would give anything — ANYTHING —’ Beth thought, ‘to slap you right now, just once right across your perfect little face.’
“The pulley Wheels, you dumb bitch!” Beth hissed, watching a shadow move across the gap between the East facing windows traps. Another scream, this one close enough to rattle the windows.
Beth's chest felt tight. Her arms and back ached with the strain of holding the bow at extension. Fran fumbled with the string, hooking one loop over the upper cams teardrop, then the other to it's mate.
“I got it. Double check.” Fran’s slender fingers slid up and down the length of the string. Her bitten nails probed at the tear drops. “It's on tight,” she said. “What next?”
A crash — flesh thudding against rotten wood. Beth looked up, squinting in the gloom at the half of the front door visible through the hall off the living room and the mud room beyond it. Another crash. The door shook. Dust boiled through a band of light out in the hall. The next scream, when it came, was so close it nearly made her flinch.
“It's not going to hold,” Fran whispered. 
“Attach the old string,” said Beth, speaking through her gritted teeth. Her traps were on fire. Her lats trembling. 
“I can't get it,” Fran whimpered, straddling the dead string where it moved against the teardrops hook. “It's too tight.” 
The door shook again. There was a dirty groan of metal tearing free of wood. Beth sucked her breath in and hauled back on the bow, not looking at the string trapped underneath your feet, not thinking about the hundreds of foot pounds of force that, if they broke, that string would whip back at them before they even knew they'd fucked up.
Fran got the string off and flung it aside. She stood and held the socket wrench out to Beth, but her face with the color of milk. Her eyes fixed on the trembling floor and the splintered trim around it’s lowest hinge. Beth lowered the bow back to resting and rolled her shoulders wining at the hot ache of torn musceles. She took the wrench and sagged under the second step of the carpeted staircase. 
“It's not going to hold,” Fran repeated.
“There’s an attic,” said Beth, tightening the bow’s upper bolt. “I saw it when we came up the driveway. Go find the door.”
She dropped the wrench as Fran scampered up the stairs. She forced herself not to dive after it. Not to drop the bow and risk twerking one of the cams. She took a breath and bent down to retrieve it, the metal felt good against her sweating palm. Cool and solid, reassuring in its weight. It felt like she must feel to Fran when they fucked: heavy and threatening. She tightened the lower bolt, then returned to the upper. A rhythmic impact shook the door. A framed picture made illegible by mold fell from one of the entertainment centers cubby holes, and broke with a bright tinkle on the floor. Muted thumps and bangs from the far side of the house, the front door splintering, claws scrabbling in the gap where the uppermost hinge had pulled loose. 
Fran's footsteps flew up the stairs. The mice had vanished. 
Beth rose, letting the socket wrench slip from her fingers and drew an arrow from the quiver at her hip. The door fell inward with the thunderous crash, men boiling in through the gap — clawing and biting to fight their way past one another. 
Beth loosed and broke for the stairs without seeing which of them she hit. She could hear him screaming, glass shattered somewhere. 
Your nerve is going.


[she finishes reading]


(CSA): Thank you for reading that. 


(GFM): Oh, my pleasure!


(CSA): There's something really satisfying — I mean, there's a lot of things that are really satisfying about that scene, but one thing that I just love is that you are building emotional tension through stringing a bow, which is like creating —


(simultaneously): — literal tension! (They giggle) 


(CSA): So I just thought I'd ask you, how do you think about building tension in a novel? How do you approach that process? 


(GFM): Well I think there's a number of paths you can take to get there; first, you have this back and forth relay that I use a lot, where you deal with a physical or material problem and an emotional problem. So, you have Beth trying to complete this extremely demanding and technically precise task in a tiny window of time, and as she puts herself through the stress and strain it brings up all of these other things that are on her mind and she has to bat them aside as she goes on. But as the reader, we're given this insight into the stress that she's operating under, day-to-day. I think, in general, a lot of my techniques for creating tension come from television, from old movies like Rififi,  where you have this 30 minute long silent heist sequence that's really all about the extreme tension of watching these men try to function as a machine for a little while. And of course the human body doesn't want to do that, and a human mind doesn't function that way — so you're really watching people go to war with themselves to do this almost super human thing, and at any moment the whole thing might snap back into the formation that it wants to occupy and ruin everything. I think that's the soul of tension. You are deforming the world in such a way that it might whip back into your face.


(CSA): After I reread this this morning, one of the things that I did was I looked up YouTube videos on how to string a bow, and then how to string a bow without a bow stringer — cuz apparently there’s a contraption that makes it a lot easier, which would not do well in a[n] apocalyptic world. I was curious about the research that you did for Manhunt; What that process looks like for you in general, what it looked like for this book, and what were some of the more interesting things that you learned? 


(GFM): Well, I learned quite a bit. I learned how to harvest eggs during ovulation, and how to select for chromosome-makeup from fertilized embryos — which was all, honestly, incredibly tedious to learn and write about. Writing about medical procedures is soooo difficult. Especially from a doctor's perspective, where they know all the terms and it's very easy to sound like you're just reading from a textbook. I got to learn a lot about food storage and shelf stability. I discovered that if you keep it in a glass container under the right conditions, Maple syrup lasts pretty much forever. You could just take it off the shelf in 300 years and put it on your pancakes. Insane! 
And then I had to learn quite a bit about weaponry too, which is not totally my bailiwick; I'm more of a Fran in that regard. But it was interesting, and I do think it's important in our day and age for queer people to have a working knowledge of how to defend themselves. So I learned how to break down a rifle and how to re-string a bow. I picked the bow for Beth, one: because it's quiet, and they're in a world where if you make a loud noise you're going to get ripped apart; and two: because there's so many fun, tense things you can do with it! A bow is so dangerous to someone who doesn't know what they're doing. 


(CSA): Yeah, I think we think of it as being somehow less scary, less dangerous than guns —


(GFM): — but that's just not true. Like, the English used to say that it takes a minute to train a pikeman and a lifetime to train an archer, and that's really, really true. The reason the armies stopped using bowmen is because it's incredibly difficult to master, and the equipment is dangerous and it's intricate, interesting. 


(CSA): You mentioned some of the medical research that you did and the difficulty of writing about medical procedures from a doctor's point of view and making that interesting; How do you do that? How did you do that? 


(GFM): (laughs) Well, I mean, you fudge it a little. You find ways to make it a little more poetic. Essentially, you're being given hard taffy and you have to warm it up in your hands and pull it. 


(CSA): (giggles) I like that metaphor.
 
(GFM): Aw, thanks!
 
(CSA): So, you've been writing horror and writing about horror in your capacity as a film critic for quite a long time now. What draws you to the genre? 


(GFM): I’ve loved to be scared ever since I was a little kid. I think that it has always been very important to me, when I experienced fear or discomfort, to just press myself up against that feeling until I understand it. And I feel I've come to a much deeper understanding of my own emotions and the way that I relate to the world through this process. It's not for everyone, but I think everyone could stand to gain from it. And also, I grew up on Stephen King and Clive Barker. I love gross shit! I love just saying the most disgusting thing I can imagine and then finding a reason that I have said it. It's electrifying and exciting and it kicks the door open in your reader's mind and gives you this opportunity to talk to them in a very vulnerable state. I find that really exciting. 


(CSA): When I read your book, I thought of myself as somebody who was not especially a horror fan and then I realized (in thinking about it afterward and in researching you and therefore coming across a lot of the things that you've written about) that it's insane that I've been saying that for half my life. I was obsessed with Cronenberg movies in college, so that alone should be disqualifying as not being a horror fan. But I think, too, a lot of the classic 50s stuff that, I think by today's standards because there were so many restrictions on what you could do in film and what you could show, were fairly tame. It's still all the same conventions, right? Like invasion of the body snatchers is objectively a horror movie 


(GFM): One hundred percent. Or The Innocents with Deborah Kerr, or the Haunting (also with Deborah Kerr). Those movies are fucking scary!


(CSA): Yeah, and I think you talked about Nosferatu in another interview which is —


(GFM): Oh my God!


(CSA): — even older, right? But truly terrifying and —


(GFM): Yeah, I'll never forget the first time that I saw the solicitor walking up that driveway, and the figure of Count Orlock appears in that massive archway, and it’s simultaneously so small and squalid and so frightening.


(CSA): I was thinking too — actually it gave me a good excuse to rewatch Existenz which I hadn't seen probably is since college —


(GFM): Oh hell yeah! 


(CSA): — which holds up! It's great and I was surprised!


(GFM): It's a good movie!


(CSA): I was surprised by how much it — you know, it was written right when the internet and video games were becoming really big and really mainstream, and it has all these commentaries on them which — you can see how it'd be easy to go back and be like, ‘Are these cringy?’ But they're not! They still work.


(GFM): Yeah, well: that's Cronenberg. He always gets right to the human stuff that ultimately anything like “the internet” is a metaphor for in a dramatic context. 


(CSA): Yeah, and it made me think, too, about… I started thinking about Jude Law's career, and all of these Sci-Fi movies that he's been in that we don't think of as horror, but they really are. Like GATTACA is—


(GFM): Oh GATTACA is definitely horror


(CSA): It's absolutely horror!


(GFM): Here's the thing: is, that at 25, I had no real idea who Jude Law was aside from the GATTACA guy, and the star of Alfie. And at 32, I think he's one of my favorite living actors. 


(CSA): He's fantastic, and he's done so many different things. 


(GFM): The Young Pope alone is, like, star-making. What an unbelievable performance.


(CSA): But I think it's so interesting, too, thinking about all of the different things that absolutely, definitely are horror in a wide variety of styles, in a wide variety of different stories that they're telling. I think you had described in an interview — You said that Manhunt is pulp, and I think there was a really interesting discussion about the stupidity of the term “elevated horror” — 


(GFM): Oh Christ! 


(CSA): — So I wanted to ask you about that. What do you mean by ‘pulp,’ and how does that play into our understanding of genre conventions?


(GFM): Here's what I mean by pulp: I'm proud to have been inspired by Stephen King and Barker and Melanie Tem; I'm proud to have been inspired by gooey stop-motion monsters in low-budget movies. That is a physical necessity. I think it's Chesterton who said that literature is a luxury and fiction a necessity — I believe that firmly. I think that we need — in a really elemental way — we need these stories about people in bizarre and fantastical situations, but who are recognizable to us, who are embodying the real fears and anxieties and dreams of our moment in time. Pulp is accessible art. It's art for the people. That's why Manhunt is never going to have a hardback edition. You can get it for anywhere from $11 to $14 (which is still more than I'd prefer, but that's about what you can do with the market right now). Pulp belongs on a revolving rack at the airport. It’s written because I love books and I love being scared, and I want to share that with other people; And because I think that everyone deserves to see stories that they are the focus of — that proceed from their unique world. I think pulp has broad appeal, but it also doesn't hold its audience's hand and walk them through anything in some big preachy way. It gets its messages across through the mayhem.


(CSA): It's kind of remarkable to me that what we think of as “elevated” so often is really handhold-y. If it's elevated you definitely should not have to explain things to people.


(GFM): Right. I think “elevated horror” is mostly a marketing term. 


(CSA): Yeah, I mean most genre terms are.


{AD BREAK} 44:06


CSA: If you’re just joining me, my guest today is writer and film critic Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose traditional publishing debut, Manhunt, follows two trans women as they try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with testosterone monsters and TERFs.
Manhunt is also an incredibly sensual book, both in it’s depictions of violence and brutality, and in its depictions of physical affection and sex. I wanted to ask you how you see the role of sex and sexuality in a novel with so much violence, and in horror, generally? 


(GFM): Well, I'm a former sex worker. Sex has always been a big part of my life. I think that it belongs in the same continuum as all other forms of human connection and relation. So the idea of writing a book without sex to me is kind of silly. It's like writing a book where nobody eats, or no one talks to each other. Sex is really mythologized in America. There's this idea that it's the most special, precious thing that two people can do together. And my opinion is honestly that it's no more inherently special than having dinner together — which is to say: could be very special and you might remember it for the rest of your life, or it might suck! It's just a thing people do, it’s no more inherently romantic or sacred than taking a shit.


(CSA): I mean, it sounds to me like what you're saying is: Sex has a role in any book. Do you feel like there's any… I guess I was curious if there's any role of it alongside that violence and brutality?


(GFM):  I mean, yeah. I think it's personal. It's compelling to me to show the ways that people cope with that sort of situation, with that constant stress and misery. And I mean, we know historically (and from our present moment), one of the ways we cope is by fucking. (Clara chuckles) And one of the things that can make sense of a world where you're subject to violence and fear on a daily basis is the release of being desired and being seen the way that you want to be seen. I think those things are so integral to how — queer people especially — survive the world. 


(CSA): How do you think your experiences as a critic has informed the way that you write?


(GFM): I think it makes me very conscious of genre conventions, and it also has equipped me with an enormous catalog of famous pieces of art; And it's just, baseline, really useful to be well-versed in five decades of horror. Not that I'm the world's foremost expert or anything, but I do pretty good. When you have that well to draw on, you have a much firmer line on the archetypal images and plots that make up horror.


(CSA): How did that figure into the way that you approached this book in this story? 


(GFM): To be totally honest, it didn't really. I did not have an outline for Manhunt until my agent was like, ‘Hey, they want your outline.” And I was like, ‘I definitely have that and will send it to you.’ (She says with sass as Clara laughs.) Maybe being a critic made me a little more organized about it. I'm used to picking a theme out of a large work and then building a thesis around it, but largely the plot of Manhunt was me racing to send an email. (She chuckles at herself) 


(CSA): Were there particular books or films or works that informed Manhunt?


(GFM): Yeah, absolutely. Two big ones that Alice Sheldon's The Screwfly Solution, which is about mysterious plague or event that causes every man in the world to start raping and murdering the women around them; and Torrey Peters Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones: A short novella about —


(CSA): So good!


(GFM): — Yeah. About a trans woman living in this post-apocalyptic world where everyone has stopped producing sex hormones because of a retrovirus. And then, I would say other big influences… Probably the single two biggest are the entire oeuvre of Stephen King's New England-set work, and then 28 Days Later by Danny Boyle.


(CSA): Oh man, that's good if you haven't seen that in a while. That scared the shit out of me.


(GFM): It's a great movie! And about halfway through, there's this moment where they find this military base, and at first they're presented with the illusion of safety — and your first real clue that something is extremely wrong is the young private who's being made to wear a frilly apron as he serves dinner; And you realize in horror: Oh my God they're raping theis guy!


(CSA): Yeah. Yeah, it really plays with gender and in interesting and upsetting ways.


(GFM): Right! And the way that we enforce gender. 


(CSA): So what are you working on these days? 


(GFM): Well, I just finished up my second novel, the Cuckoo, which is about a group of teens who, in the mid-1990s, get sent to a conversion camp in Utah. And once they get there, they discover that something at the camp is making copies of all the kids. I'm really, really excited to see how people react to that one. It's like a body snatcher.
 
(CSA): Yeah, I was going to say queer invasion of the body snatchers.


(GFM): Right. On a much smaller scale. And then I'm just now starting on my third novel, which is titled Mommy, and it's about intergenerational Dyke relationships, and an undying witch.


(CSA): It sounds like you got a lot of good stuff going on. 


(GFM): Thanks, yeah. I'm hopeful. People have been so receptive to Manhunt and so excited about it. It's been really great to experience. I hope I get to keep doing this for a while. 


(CSA): Well I hope so, too. One last question — are therebooks that you're excited about reading? 


(GFM): Let's see. I just got Joe Koch’s Convulsive collection of their short fiction; I'm so stoked about that! There's no one whose prose is more just ripe to the point of spoiled. God, they can really write. And I'm super excited about Ottessa Moshfegh Lapvona, which is a piece of medieval horror, which is my favorite subgenre. 


(CSA): Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. This is lovely. 


(GFM): My pleasure, Clara. Thanks for having me. 


(CSA): Please everyone, go out and buy Manhunt. You can find Gretchen and her writing on patreon, patreon.com/scumbelievable or Twitter, where she is at @scumbelievable.
Catch STORY BEHIND THE STORY the first Friday of every month from 5-6pm on KSQD 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at clara@ksqd.org. 


THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.