Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a trans woman myself, I found the characters of this book to be difficult to connect with. I'm not someone who reads too much commercial writing, so it could just be that I'm not the target audience for this. But I usually have a lot of fun reading horror and sci-fi written by women, whether it's more literary, writerly, or commercial. I don't think the distinction between these kinds of writing is set in stone or represents a hierarchical relationship, especially because it's the *subjectivity* of the character's and narrator(s) that makes these works so fun to read and connect with. We often share an "outsider," critical view of how male horror genders "hysteria," the abject, and sublimated manifestations of death denial, body horror, and metaphysical oblivion in ways that feel sexist or off the mark. This is part of what makes discovering women's horror, sci-fi, and dystopian writing feel so generative to connect with. To share a vision that counters the dominant, hegemonic ideologies of sexism and racism that so many well-known male author's writings are entrenched in. This book, unfortunately, feels more like the latter kind of horror writing I'm naming than the former. The character studies, the interrelationships and their basis, the subtext, the themes... it just didn't resonate. Body horror and even gore offer deeper inroads to that subconscious plane from which horror is conjured. It can be layered. It can offer up more than just the grotesque for the sake of the ick factor. But here, there is only one dimensional, surface-level engagement, that never lets us see the character's connect (or not) in ways that feel rooted in female subjectivity. As a transgender woman myself, I felt extremely alienated by this writing. It just didn't connect with my experiences living or coming of age in a big city LGBTQ community. It didn't connect with my experiences of female friendship. None of the characters seemed to capture the distinct complexities of desire that so many of us, trans people, gay people, lesbians, bisexuals, experience on a daily basis, much less the possibility of how we could connect standing before the end of the world. I'd like to think that characters who have spent their lives as outcasts of compulsory, sex-based roles -- be it gender identity, personal expression, or sexuality and desire -- would sooner use the apocalyptic situation to carve out new modes of living, new ways of relating, new interpersonal cultures and local systems of governance to stand against the rabid violence of those men, than inexplicably perpetuate the very violence that has hung always overhead pre-apocalypse. Maybe that's me more "writing for" the author than simply giving criticism, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that the characters presented by this author just don't feel authentic, real, and rooted in the experiences or subjectivity one would expect. But that's just my two cents. Sorry for writing so much. Imho the "nameless woman" anthology by trans women of color is much much much better, more imaginative, more resounding, etc. But again that's just my opinion.