This is definitely a novel that's going to stay with me, even though I can't really say that I enjoyed it. It would be truer to say that I endured it, because it's unlike anything that I've encountered before. It's mostly reprehensible but I have to grudgingly admire how the author clearly wanted to divide the reading community. You're going to see people rave about this book and you're going to see even more people claim that it's the worst thing they've ever read. Neither are right but such is the power of art to offend and this one does that very well indeed.

The real question boils down to  whether it does anything else, because it seems to be a literary prank that has only one purpose: to thoroughly piss off every single evangelical conservative in the United States. It's hard to imagine a book more specifically tailored to that end. All the men in it are literally ravenous beasts, courtesy of the t. rex virus, in a transparent polemic on the patriarchy. Women rule the world now, but those women aren't all the same. Some, for instance, are TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who find their newfound freedom spoiled by the presence of people of transgender, so war against them as thoroughly as they war against the men.

Every list item you might conjure up from that is checked off. The TERFs call themselves womyn. J. K. Rowling turns up in a story within the story, just so karma can take care of her in brutal fashion. There are many different pronouns in play and it's easy to forget which characters use which ones, especially as I'm pretty sure that the author does too at a couple of points. What seems like everyone with a name is clearly nymphomaniac, so we're treated to countless sex scenes during which we mostly attempt to recall which genitalia each of these characters have. I'm pretty sure that not one trans character is American but the author doesn't initially disclose those details and we gradually learn them over time.

Oh, and that cover art? That's not the pair of plums you might initially think.

In other words, if you're a rabid puppy, this is fundamentally designed to trigger you on every page. And I kind of dig that. If anyone deserves to be trolled, it's a rabid puppy. It pleases me to imagine them losing their shit over what Gretchen Felker-Martin does in this novel. And hey, it's "a timely, powerful response to every gender-based apocalypse story that failed to consider the existence of transgender and non-binary people", just like it says on the box. I just wish it was more believable. Literally half the world here is transgender people of colour with rapacious sexual appetites. The other half are TERFs.

The plot is relatively straightforward. With every man on the planet now a beast driven by their base instincts to do little except eat and rape, civilisation has mostly collapsed. Transgender characters, like our protagonists Beth, Fran and Robbie, weren't changed by t. rex because they're fundamentally women, even if their bodies are still decorated with what seem like perpetually erect penises. They spend their time hunting men with crossbows and harvesting estrogen from their testicles to keep them from turning too.

At least, that's what they do early on, when this feels like a women vs. men story, even if the women are really trans-women, mostly pre-op and never likely to receive that op, what with the fall of civilisation and all. However, their true enemies are not the men, who are almost a chore rather than a foe. Their true enemies are TERFs, who escaped their centuries-long oppression at the hands of men only to return that oppression on trans-women, who they may hate even more than they hated men. Their leader is Teach, but it's her eventual lieutenant Ramona who we see the most of, because not everyone in the TERF army is on board with Teach's rhetoric, even if their decisions are emotional and unexplainable.

What that means is that this is a massively misogynistic read, ironically given that the men surely can't be held responsible for their actions. After all, there's no intelligence left, so none of them can make decisions, rational or otherwise. All they have is instinct. The TERFs, on the other hand, are sentient beings who merely choose to believe that a trans-woman is not a woman, which, in this book, translates to dedicating every waking hour in the post-apocalypse not to surviving but to ridding the world of anyone trans, as if it's the only thing that matters. Trans good. TERF bad. Man worse.

What's more, those trans-women are clearly meant to be our heroes, but that's a hard sell. When they're in the woods hunting men, they're sympathetic, but otherwise they do little but hate themselves and leap into bed with as many other people as they can. I could use the word "womanising" to describe most of them and that's not endearing. It has to be said that taking the worst aspects of men and transferring them over to trans and female characters doesn't ground them. It merely makes them just as bad and just as unsympathetic.

I see that Felker-Martin has spoken out about how she feels that there should be more rape in fiction and that's upset a lot of people. I have no problem with rape in fiction, as long as it's there for a reason and it's handled believably. And it isn't here. Maybe I can buy into the TERFs fostering stables of "daddies", trans-women in drag playing men for them to rape, but Beth's experience was inexplicable to me. She's raped by a man with a barbed penis that shreds her internally and we're supposed to buy into her wanting a sexual encounter with the doctor trying to sew her up about five minutes later? That's not how trauma works.

Of course, as an old straight white guy, even if I'm not American, I'm completely out of my league with reference points. I can't speak for women, let alone TERFs, and I can't speak for trans-women either. I'd certainly like to read more horror by women, trans or born, but I struggled with this one for a lot of reasons, mostly because it's vicious and cruel. I'm sure Felker-Martin would say that life is too, but that can only back this up so far. I appreciate the diversity on offer, which is refreshing, given that not one character is male and not everyone else was born with female parts, but I wanted this to be less of a polemic and more of a story.

It's here to shock and it does that, very well indeed. Most naysayers won't get very far into it. I'm kind of thankful that I stuck the course but I won't be reading it again. ~~ Hal C F Astell