Interview: Gretchen Felker-Martin on Manhunt, and Refusing to Hide the Violence of the Everyday

By Claire Davidson

Gretchen Felker-Martin has an intimate knowledge of horror, and one that spans many different lenses. A fiction author, film critic, and film curator through her Deadlights Theater Discord server, Felker-Martin has made it her life’s objective to expand the horror canon, her bracing, disquieting, and visceral approach to the genre proving a desperately necessary tonic in our increasingly moralized times. Though Felker-Martin has previously released self-published novellas, the new novel Manhunt, out February 22 from Tor Nightfire, marks her debut into the greater literary discourse.

Already appearing on numerous lists of the most anticipated books of 2022, Manhunt is both a blistering, gory call to action and a tender affirmation of community among those who are most marginalized by state-sponsored weaponization of gender norms. Following two trans women, Fran and Beth, as they navigate a post-apocalyptic world now run by TERF ideology in the wake of a virus that ravaged anyone with more than a certain amount of testosterone, Manhunt is equal parts harrowing, affecting, and celebratory, blunt and caustic while maintaining a fiery rage within its core. The book is rare in how it straddles the line between supreme, specific timeliness and compelling, invigorating narrative—such purposeful intent is likewise reflected in this interview, in which Felker-Martin discusses the novel, her Deadlights programming, the state of contemporary horror, and the necessity of depicting the violence begotten by the world.

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Claire Davidson: You stated that the concept of Manhunt was initially a joke, and then eventually blossomed into a novel. What was the process between coming up with that and then fully realizing it?

Gretchen Felker-Martin: You know, I think it was a matter of just feeding that initial idea seed, the right books and movies. At the time, I had just read Torrey Peters’ Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, where a retrovirus causes all human beings to stop producing sex hormones. Shortly thereafter, I read The Screwfly Solution, where a mysterious illness or force causes all men to want to attack and rape and kill women. What I do a lot of the time when I’m trying to give an idea some legs is look at the ways it’s been executed before and find the uncovered territory. These are famous stories that have been really influential in different ways, and they leave a lot of the world unexamined. Especially in post-apocalyptic media, it’s almost always about cool, physically capable white people running around and solving the world’s problems or protecting their families or whatever. I wanted to do something that was really, manifestly not that.

Davidson: So where were you at the time you started developing this idea? Was it during the pandemic?

Felker-Martin: It was before, actually.

Davidson: How did that affect your view of how the world was going to develop in the novel?

Felker-Martin: Oh, man, I already had a pretty solid chunk of it down. By the time COVID rolled over the US, it became apparent that it wasn’t going to last two weeks or something. I wouldn’t say it influenced me much—except in ways that would be hard for me to define, because then I was shut inside for a whole year as I finished it. Certainly it’s got to be a different book than it would have been otherwise. I would say that the idea of the collapse of the American government became much more intimate over that time.

Davidson: That actually leads me very well into my next question. In the novel, you very refreshingly and unambiguously depict TERF rhetoric as the fascist ideology that is next in line to really subsume the government once the virus begins to ravage the world. What was it like to write about that, that transition of power that a lot of people—the majority of the world, really—don’t name with the severity it deserves?

Felker-Martin: Yeah, I would say I agree with Judith Butler: I think that TERFs are fascists. I think that they are white supremacists, and typically that they have the incoherence, the reliance on state violence of fascism. To me, it was really important to go as hard as I could with this book because, as you say, very few people will talk about them as I believe they deserve to be talked about. These are really contemptible human beings who take whatever frustrations they have going on in their lives and direct them downhill at whoever they can find weaker and more vulnerable, which I think is a classic building block of fascism and of white supremacy. You know, [there’s a] phrase. I can’t remember who said it, but it’s something like, “Take the meanest white man and show him or tell him that he’s superior to a black man, and you’ll ally him to the cause of people who are actually his social oppressors.” You can formulate solidarity between people with mutually opposing interests by picking a common enemy who is weaker and more degraded.

Davidson: You mentioned Judith Butler. I did have them in mind while I was reading the novel and seeing how exactly the government worked, because the world had been ravaged and a lot of the buildings had collapsed or had been hollowed out from the inside. But even then, I feel like it’s sort of a novelty to discuss that rhetoric with such frankness. I think part of the reason why that interview did go viral was because there was a sort of novelty in how Judith Butler was very unabashed with that word choice. And I feel like a part of it was just a desire to name them so strongly that I don’t think people really considered the implications unless they really thought about it. I think part of it was just, you know, finally somebody got it. And finally somebody with a very credible track record understood the very real implications of what was going on.

Felker-Martin: Yeah, it was tremendously refreshing to see that.

Davidson: You’ve said a lot that you are a horror writer, but your domain is primarily body horror. In the novel, I did notice that bodily horror and a very heightened appreciation, almost ecstasy, are very frequently intertwined, especially in sexual situations. What prompted you to develop that in such a very layered way? 

Felker-Martin: I guess for me those things are kind of inextricable. I have body dysmorphic disorder, which is an obsessive compulsive disorder where you fixate on real or imagined imperfections in your appearance. And you may become so obsessed with them that you might experience hallucinations that your body is rotting or that sores are opening up in your skin. So I have a very obsessive relationship with my body. And that kind of intense, inescapable revulsion is always at least nearby, which makes it something that any strong emotion can bring out. The euphoria of having powerful human sexual connection can easily become intertwined with it—in my experience, anyway—really deep experience of knowing your body can lead to both of those things.

Davidson: Do you think that those visions and intrusive thoughts play a role in how gore-heavy the novel is?

Felker-Martin: That’s how I move through the world. And so that’s how a lot of my characters move through the world.

Davidson: Not only are you a writer of horror fiction, in terms of both novels and shorter forms, but you’re also a critic and a screener of movies, committed to helping both inexperienced lovers of the medium and newcomers expand their repertoire with both more canonically considered classics and more niche work. How do you think this lens affects how you move through one medium into another?

Felker-Martin: Well, I think it’s given me a really broad knowledge base, which has been very, very helpful in learning how to construct my own stories. I’ve been writing for almost two decades, but in a lot of ways I’m just learning how to compose a really accessible novel in the classic sense. A lot of my earlier work is much more like vignettes and interconnected moments in lives. This is much more plotted, which is not my inclination. And in general, I think that being both someone who is really voracious about how much film and television and print she takes in and being someone who has to think about these things professionally, in several capacities, is really good for me [and] keeps me on my toes. It keeps me up to date with what’s happening in the world at large. And it makes sure that my inspiration… is not myopic, you know, [so] I’m not coming from just one place. I’ve found it really, really helpful.

Davidson: What do you think you’ve learned in the more communal experience of something like the Deadlights Theater, where so many people are reacting to one piece of work all at the same time and having so many different reactions to it? What do you think that’s taught you about not only how you view things, but how you write things as well?

Felker-Martin: I think it’s really shown me in a direct way that if you set expectations for people, many of them are eager to experience art [in a] serious, challenging way. You know, I think that if you say, “Okay, we’re going to watch something really difficult together and we’re going to experience it together,” it can be very powerful. I remember during the initial festival that Deadlights came out of, I watched The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover with about 40 or 50 people. At one point, almost everyone in the chat was talking about how they were crying. And it was proving to me that we can all have such a serious experience together—that even with a bunch of people who are, you know, jokers or riots, we could have this really serious and intense experience as a group that is very meaningful to me. I think I’ve gotten a lot of things like that at Deadlights.

“If you set expectations for people, many of them are eager to experience art [in a] serious, challenging way.”

Davidson: To pivot away from the novel a little bit, I wanted to know more about the conception of [your online film curation service] Deadlights. I know it was listed on your Patreon and is, first and foremost, a monetary opportunity, because it’s at the $10 patron level. But what inspired you to use Discord like that? Because I know you’re not the only one. Annie Rose Malamet, I know she’s doing that right now with a little bit more niche picks with her Patreon as well. But what inspired you to use Discord in a way that makes it easier to watch things like Helter Skelter. I know you did a whole month of David Cronenberg, [including] his more inaccessible works. 

Felker-Martin: As you say, it’s partially how I make my living. I realized that I was not really exercising my skills as an archivist and as a curator, which I love to do. I love to program and I love to share art with people. And I was also very much inspired by Annie, whose viewings I make when I can, and who does show more obscure, sleazy, subversive cinema—whereas I think I show a fair amount of things from the lunatic fringe. You mentioned Helter Skelter, but I also love that canonical horror of the past 50 years. I think that’s really where my interest is. 

I also realized that there are really very few interactive, online [services] that have any kind of quality programming. That’s not to disparage people who are performing their own showings. I just think after the festival, which was the test runner—the festival was free, and will continue to be free every year—that was such a rewarding experience. And it showed me that I could have a really sustainable way of interacting with these people who really care about my work on movies. And also, I learned a tremendous amount about film, just by interacting with them. 

Davidson: To go back to your point about programmers and horror as a genre, I honestly don’t think you’re too far off the ball. I feel like even among people who are curious to learn about more obscure works of film, horror gets really sidelined as more of a niche opportunity—whether it be through streaming services like Netflix, Hulu. They have terrible selections. And usually you have to go to, like, the only streaming service I can think of that has quality horror is, ironically, Tubi. Which I feel people treat as the bastard child of streaming services, not only because it’s free but also just because it has the most random collection of things.

Felker-Martin: Yeah, you can find pretty much anything there. I find that HBO Max has a surprisingly good horror library. It’s not comprehensive, but it does have some good deep cuts. And then, of course, there’s Shudder, which is wall-to-wall horror, plucking interesting stuff out of the vast wasteland of the last century in film. But, yeah, obviously horror has been overlooked for many, many, many years. We’re just sort of living through the first decade of what I would call critically acclaimed horror.

Davidson: “Elevated horror.” 

Felker-Martin: I despise that term. 

Davidson: Yeah, me too.

Felker-Martin: Horror is horror, you know. I don’t know how to seriously claim that new things are being done in horror that elevate it above the conceit of the genre when you can go back a century to Murnau’s Nosferatu and see this cinematography that laid the groundwork for everything that came. If Murnau is working seriously in horror—which he does both with Faust and with Nosferatu—if The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has had an equally tremendous influence through German expressionism and set design, how can you possibly say that horror is not a driving force in art, especially in film?

Davidson: I think a lot of what really informs the “elevated horror” category, really, isn’t that it’s more innovative, because it’s definitely not. I think it’s just more respectable and built on implication. Because now, you know, we can kind of have the world at our fingertips, especially with a lot of digital innovation, which I think has been both helpful and harmful to the genre. But I think because we can sort of do anything when it comes to developing gore, developing sound, and whatnot, I feel like there’s this predominant theme that there’s nowhere left to go. And so by resting more on implication, and less on the more overt, visceral reactions, that sort of gained a new wave of respect. Conversely, I think that it’s very counterintuitive as a whole—not that the individual works that get slotted under there are counterproductive, but just the way they’re viewed within larger criticism.

Felker-Martin: It’s a very exclusionary, sort of myopic brand of criticism, to look at a handful of recent horror movies—some of which are actually quite graphic, and really don’t fit the mold that’s being proposed. To say that somehow these are transcending what we traditionally think of as horror, I think, is just sort of willful ignorance. I mean, Rosemary’s Baby was made 50 years ago. 

Davidson: You have a column on your Patreon called, “Thanks, I Hate It.” First of all, I have a big amount of respect for that. We need hatefulness to come back in film criticism. But you also have very many retrospective pieces and even advice columns that dig into both the positive and negative aspects of your film criticism. In an age where a lot of film criticism keels very much towards the popular consensus, and is often defanged as a result, what do you think is the importance of having just an unabashed column dedicated to everything that pushes your buttons?

Felker-Martin: I think it’s important to think about what you don’t like and to refine that, that sensibility of those experiences. I mean, if you let your boredom and your irritation dictate your tastes, you’re not going to have any real idea of where you’ll end up, and what you’ll enjoy watching. But if you dig into those things, then I think you can gain insight about film and into what you need to check yourself with more. You know, I was 17 at one point in my life and couldn’t sit still through Seven Samurai, and if I had let that determine who I was going to be as an adult in terms of the art that I loved, I think I’d be a much more boring person. So I think that exercising negative criticism allows you to define the space between where you need to grow and where art falls short.

Davidson: You’ve stated on many occasions that you don’t really rely on a very sentimental notion of your writing practice: you don’t really rely on vague notions of “inspiration” to write, you just sit down and get the work done. You’ve also stated that your background as a working-class writer has informed that relationship to time management. Particularly when you’re not living in a huge literary scene, how does that inform the writing you produce now?

Felker-Martin: I think that writing is something that I love, but writing is also my job. Even before I had switched over to making my living full-time off of film criticism and fiction, it was a job. You sit down, you do a certain amount of work everyday, and at the end of a certain period of time, you have a finished product and hopefully people will want to read it. It’s never seemed particularly romantic to me. Writers like Neil Gaiman who talk about “the magic of storytelling,” that has never appealed to me. I don’t understand it, I don’t have much appreciation for it. I think that narrative and stories are something that are universal to human beings—and we all enjoy it—but so is taking a shit. You know, there’s nothing special about it.

Davidson: That was a really unexpected comparison, but I actually totally agree with you. I feel like, especially recently, there’s been a very reactionary weight placed on—especially in politically turbulent environments—the idea that narrative is a tool for eliciting empathy, which I think is sort of reductive of what the point of a lot of fiction is, because a lot of fiction doesn’t exist to make you feel good.

Felker-Martin: No, no, it doesn’t, and I think you’re right. When people don’t have any control over their own lives, when they’re living through crisis after crisis, and voting has ceased to matter—if it ever did—there’s just no way to get a handle on the sort of things that will happen to you, your family, your loved ones and friends. You look for other arenas where you can fight and exercise your frustrations, and so often that arena is popular culture. I mean, if you think about the Nazis in their crusade against “degenerate” art, that was born directly out of a massive economic depression caused by the sticking of Germany with the bill for World War I. When you create these situations where people are powerless, they will channel that frustration into something else, and it is seldom good.

“Narrative and stories are something that are universal to human beings—but so is taking a shit.”

Davidson: Manhunt is the first widely distributed novel you’ve released. You have a lot of your older novella works available on your Patreon, but this is the first thing that a lot of people can type into a search bar and order directly from the publisher. What was the most daunting element of that prospect for you, and what was the most exciting part about it?

Felker-Martin: Well, I think the most exciting part is that this book is going to reach trans people all over the world. You know, there’s already a Turkish translation in the works. We’ve had some interest from other countries and I’m really deeply thrilled by the idea of connecting with all those people through my art. I think the most daunting part about this process is, a) just the sheer amount of attention, it can be very overwhelming; and b) the fact that a lot of people are going to read this book who do not really have the critical faculties to deal with a book that is this ugly, very difficult, unpleasant, offensive book in a lot of ways, by design. And clearly, even the premise is extreme. It provokes big reactions from some people who are not particularly mature as readers.

Davidson: I definitely agree with that. When you tweeted out how you were recognizing how many lists this was appearing on and you realized that thousands of people were going to read this book, I saw you say, “oh, no,” afterwards as a follow up. I was just starting to read the first few pages, which I wouldn’t say are the most upsetting parts of the book, but they’re definitely the goriest. And I was right there with you. I was like, “Oh, yeah, there are going to be a lot of people who totally don’t understand this.”

Felker-Martin: Yeah. You know, I think it’s perfectly normal and acceptable for people to not get it and not like it. That is just the nature of art. But the stressful part comes when they’re unable to restrain themselves from making that my problem.

Davidson: Speaking of difficult, upsetting things—and I’m very sorry to frame this question this way—but, about six months ago, you tweeted in response to a claim that no work of art has ever been enhanced by the depiction of sexual assault. You said that you “truly, sincerely believe that art should have more rape in it,” and prior to that you listed work such as The Sopranos, Eve’s Bayou, and The Handmaiden to counter the claim. As the world appears more transparently uninhabitable, many works of narrative art—and, in turn, the criticism that meets them—have grown more moralized and binaristic in their thinking, to the point where even largely accessible films (the one I wrote down was Licorice Pizza) receive backlash for fundamental misunderstandings of their narrative goals. How do you think your novel, as well as your body of work at large, responds to this growing framework?

Felker-Martin: I think it’s it’s pretty unambiguous that my work is a big “fuck you” to that way of thinking. I no longer speak publicly about the trauma that I’ve gone through in my life because I do not feel I should have to in order to make art about certain things. But suffice to say that I have been through it, and that almost everyone I know has been through some version of it, and to not talk about sexual violence is tantamount to pretending it doesn’t exist. I refuse to do that. 

I think that art can address things that we would otherwise never get to resolve in our lives. I think art can help people feel less alone when it mirrors common experiences untalked about in polite society, or are actively repressed, even in popular culture. When you think about the response to some of Game of Thrones, fictional depictions of rape, the enormous outpouring of affront—people were offended that such a thing would even occur near a screen, and I just don’t think that’s a healthy environment. I think that it’s perfectly normal for people to not want to see it and that’s fine, but there is rape in art. 

You never hear this about murder, you know. No one is out there protesting CSI or whatever other procedurals are the most popular shows in the world, sort of by default. I think we have a bizarre double standard about sexual violence, and that it contributes to sexual violence being shoved and ignored—and, to the victims of sexual violence, leaving them feeling isolated from one another and unclean because of what they’ve gone through. And I have no patience for that. I do not engage in it. My work has always been about experiences of sexual violence.

Davidson: And I think you’re right in that. You did make a really good point about the standard between, you know, how much state violence is normalized with many cop procedurals just on television, and how many of those you can find that are basically just about the same thing. I think it feeds into this cycle, where you garner such a visceral response, where people require that justification of you having to experience it—which, of course, you don’t want to talk about. Because that did happen in real life and that did have real-life effects. I feel like by siloing it away, it creates people who become unused to dealing with it as a genuine, real issue. There’s all these rules that the people who do dare to speak about it have to jump through in order to depict it. 

Felker-Martin: Exactly. 

Davidson: It also, I think, ignores a lot of the potential for power dynamics to be examined in that, because all violence is not created the same. 

Felker-Martin: Yes. 

Davidson: Where do you think you’re going forward after Manhunt, now that it’s opened so many doors for you?

Felker-Martin: Well, I have one more book in my contract, or at least for the immediate future. I’m currently finishing my second novel, called The Cuckoo, which is about a conversion therapy camp in the Nineties and a small group of queer and trans teens who were sent there by their parents. And once they discover that something at the camp is, in fact, making compliant copies of the children and sending them back.

Davidson: I’m really excited for that. I think that’s going to do it for all of my questions that I have scheduled. Was there anything else you wanted to say?

Felker-Martin: I would just like to say thank you for this helpful interview. This is a lot of fun.

Davidson: Thanks for keeping your cat in frame, for one thing.

Felker-Martin: Oh, you’re welcome. He’s a good little guy.

Special thanks to Gretchen Felker-Martin. Her novel Manhunt will be available February 22 from Tor Nightfire.

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