Alison Rumfitt's second horror novel, after 'Tell Me I'm Worthless', shares a lot of ground with the most memorable book I read last year, Gretchen Felker-Martin's 'Manhunt', which, I should clarify, was not one of my favourites. Now, it spins those common elements in a notably different direction but ends up leading it to the exact same place, in that it's another book that's not remotely easy to forget but one that surely isn't going to make my favourites list at the end of the year.

If you'll recall, 'Manhunt' visits a virus onto our world that turns all the men into literal beasts, who are then hunted by pre-op trans women heroes for the oestrogen that can be harvested from their testicles. However, the real story is the war between these trans women and TERFs, the remainder of the population, for reasons of hate. It seemed more like a catharsis for TERF haters than a novel and that political diatribe didn't help its story.

'Brainwyrms' also pits trans women against TERFs, who are taking over in fiction from men as their natural enemy. There's no apocalypse this time, just a near future in which being trans has become illegal, but there is what might be a virus in the brainwyrms of the title, because TERFs are literally infected with a disease that makes them hate trans women and perhaps has no other symptom but a habit of falling into orgies whenever they murder one.

Rather than marginalising men by turning them into beasts, this marginalises them by turning them into insignificant background. The only men we spend time with are as outrageously kinky as the trans women, and, let me tell you, that means really kinky, because watersports are a starting point on a scale that goes off the deepend very quickly indeed and never stops falling. It's only the third chapter when Frankie celebrates her first sexual experience with Vanya by urinating into her mouth in the bathroom of a fetish club. If that's too much for you, then by all that's holy, don't pick up this book.

Frankie and Vanya are our leads. For the longest time, we assume Frankie is the lead, because she has the background and the focus and everything seems to be about her, but Vanya gradually takes over. The later chapters are more and more told in her rambling prose, like a self-hating diary that she recorded through a speech to text app that doesn't understand punctuation. I personally found Vanya more interesting than Frankie but those stream of consciousness chapters get old and tiring quickly and the novel struggles to escape them towards the end.

Frankie is a trans woman, post-op, and the victim of a terrorist attack as her workplace is bombed. She's bi and has an impregnation fetish, even though the op she had wasn't so magical as to make that possible. There's one scene in which she experiences phantom limb syndrome with regards to her now non-existent penis. She's also dominant in her sexual relations, which can, on occasion, go a little too far. I believe she's supposed to be sympathetic but she felt more like a monster to me, not because she's trans but because she doesn't treat anyone else with respect.

I believe Vanya is also a post-op trans woman, but it often felt like she's a girl whose family want to be a boy. Either way, she has lady parts and absolutely no self-worth. Not only is she a sub who has a fondness for enduring horrible things, she has a parasite fetish. Given how many outrageous kinks are on display in this book, it's interesting that this one becomes the most disgusting. There's a lot of incestuous mummy/daddy talk during sex; there's mention of a furry whose addiction to eating his own excrement becomes fatal; and there's a weird dream sequence, told in the second person, that involves masturbation after shoving fresh excrement from a dead fox inside your vagina.

However, it's worth mentioning that the most disgusting scene comes right before page 175, which ironically contains a warning to the reader that the next few chapters are going to be extreme. It's the sort of scene that you might conjure up in a nightmare if that nightmare happens to involve a pair of lesbian post-op trans women, one of whom has a tapeworm fetish and the other of whom is apparently unaware that she's high on acid. This arrives roughly halfway through the book and it's fair to say that a lot of readers are not going to get any further.

I'm talking about kinks here because that's what this becomes, as surely as the 'Anita Blake' series by Laurell K. Hamilton starts out with real stories and gradually turns into lycanthropic porn. Alison Rumfitt starts out like she's building a plot but gradually gets distracted by kinks until the book is a collection of them, exhibited mostly by a pair of damaged people with decades of trauma, both old and new, and the plot gradually fades away until we completely forget what it is. Jennifer Caldwell, a thinly veiled avatar for J. K. Rowling, shows up late in the book and that reminds us that the plot hasn't been jettisoned, just forgotten for a while.

Frankly, though, you're not going to read this for its plot. Like 'Manhunt', it's there to serve as wish fulfilment for trans women who dream about doing outrageously awful things to TERFs in general and Rowling in particular but are grounded enough to not do that in real life. This is a way to feel a kinship with other trans women and live vicariously through them. It's probably fair to say that the books are both trauma porn too, visiting outrageously awful things on characters that readers will identify with, at least to a degree, so that they can share and even relish in that trauma.

Given that I've now reviewed two books in this vein that are published by major publishers, there's clearly a place in the market for them, but I'm not a trans woman and that constant self-loathing is even more offputting to me than the most overtly disgusting scenes. While I'm happy that general representation of minorities has increased massively in major genre publishing, I'm still waiting on a horror novel with trans women as the lead and focus that doesn't descend into TERF-bashing and forgotten plots. ~~ Hal C F Astell