In the novel, a wealthy “bunker brat” impregnates a dozen women with her zombified boyfriend’s sperm to see if she will be safe trying to have a baby with him. Under-resourced people undergo the brunt of pregnancy-related collateral damage in Manhunt, just as they do in real life. Yet in the post-apocalyptic world of Manhunt, as in the twenty-first century United States, abortion access varies widely and depends on the pregnant person’s financial and social resources. To abort, in this world, is to avoid being eaten from the inside out. In a year, it’s sexually mature.” Gossip tells of “a woman in Vermont whose boy twins had eaten their way out of her.” In this science-fiction world, pregnancy is not only dangerous for all the usual reasons, but also because a zombified fetus might eat its way through the abdominal wall (just like in Alien). A few hours later, it can hunt for itself. It undergoes viral metamorphosis in utero and eats its way out of the mother at three or four months. A fertility specialist explains the process to a wealthy patient: “When they impregnate a victim, the baby is XY. In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2021 horror novel Manhunt, pregnancy itself becomes a kind of body horror as testosterone turns people into sex-crazed zombies bent on cannibalism. What for others may evoke joy and anticipation for me evokes fear. When I consider being pregnant myself, I imagine Sigourney Weaver from the original Alien: a wet head emerging, its teeth bared, as I scream and scream.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |