The Transfeminine Review

Welcome back! Thank you so much to everyone who supported our latest article this Sunday – if you missed it, you can catch Transfemininity and Dissociative Identity Disorder: An Undertheorized Instersection right here. We had our best day of traffic ever on Monday! I appreciate y’all for the flexibility with the update schedule over the last few weeks, I’ll be less busy soon :3

I have a confession to make – Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt was the first horror novel that I ever read. I didn’t grow up with the genre and my family is squeamish, but it’s been a real joy to discover horror for the first time. There’s so much fantastic transfemme horror out there right now, and so much that’s been released in 2024(!), so I’m super pumped to tell you about all the cool books I’ve been reading over the course of this October!

I’ve included a table of contents here for quick navigation:

1. ⭐ Tell Me I’m Worthless – Alison Rumfitt (2021)
2. The Fissure King – Rachel Pollack (2017)
3. Transmuted – Eve Harms (2021)
4. ⭐ All The Hearts You Eat – Hailey Piper (2024)
5. Fluids – May Leitz (2022)
6. Unmarked Grave – Carietta Dorsch (2024)
7. Saltbrook: An Alicia Lake Investigation – Dee Arbacauskas (2024)
8. ⭐ Kimmy – Alyson Greaves (2024)
9. Our Monsters – Jemma Topaz (2022)
10. Slime Time – Mackenzie Rice (2022)
11. The Familialists – TT Madden (2024)
12. Morbid Obsessions – Alison Rumfitt, Frankie Miren (2022)

There’s a mix of books on this list, with lots of different levels of spookiness and terror to go around, so that’s why I’ve invented my very important Spookiness Scale to help you figure out what spice level is right for you:

🧙‍♀️ – Level One: Spooky but not Scary. It’s got beasties and mysterious forces galore, but it’s not gonna keep you up at night.

🧙‍♀️🦇- Level Two: Goosebumps. It’s got some jumps and scares, but nothing much worse than your neighborhood haunted house.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸 – Level Three: A Little Bloody. If you’ve got a phobia, this’ll hit you hard. But you might enjoy just being along for the ride.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀 – Level Four: Getting Nasty. It’s gross. It’s intense. If you’ve don’t like horror as a genre, this is probably about where you’ll stop having fun.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀🔪 – Level Five: Properly Scary. Don’t read these books in the middle of the night unless you’re willing to lose some sleep.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀🔪☠️ – Level Six: Viscerally Disturbing. This is where I would start to class books as either “extreme horror” or “very direct about the nature of bigotry” (or both). It probably has a trigger warning on the cover. So, yknow, read the damn trigger warnings.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀🔪☠️🕊️ – Level Seven: Dead Dove. Don’t eat it. And don’t say we didn’t warn you.

There’s a book on here for everyone, and I hope that this helps folks to sort out what they’re looking for and what fits their comfort levels.

There are also some books on this list that I adore with my whole heart and soul, and I want y’all to know my absolute faves :)) So if a book has a gold star next to the title (⭐), that means it’s a personal favorite.

An obvious disclaimer: in no way, shape, or form is this list attempting to be comprehensive. I’ve only put books on here that I’ve personally read or enjoyed, and I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what’s out there! Is there a spooky novel by a transfemme that you adore which I didn’t include here? Let people know about it in the comments!

Without further ado, let’s get into the list!

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Why You Should Read It: This book delivers probably the best critique of TERFism I’ve ever read from any source. Alice and Ila are both profoundly screwed up, and they foil each other in the most satisfying ways. Rumfitt has said before that any good haunted house can’t just be a metaphor, that it’s gotta take you in and spit you out, and the haunted mansion she delivers here is spectacularly fucked up. The examination of Anti-Semitism is masterfully executed, and the splitscreen scene (you’ll know it when you get to it) is one of the most powerful and technically astute chapters of prose I’ve ever read. Nothing short of exceptional.

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Why You Should Read It: This was Pollack’s last novel, and it shows. It may be dressed in paranormal trappings, but The Fissure King is a meditation on life, death, and eternity, replete with all of Pollack’s vast spiritual wisdom and care. It may not be the scariest book on this list, but it’s one of the most profound, and undeniably lives up to its Halloween aesthetic.

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Why You Should Read It: This one’s a fun pulpy romp. Harms takes her reader on a wild ride through horror subgenres, so if you’re a fan of variety and enjoy the trappings of classic pulp horror, this’ll be a fantastic read. I also love this book purely for the fact that there’s something incredibly relatable about the transfeminine experience of being attracted to people who want to kill you (or watch you fight to the death for sport :P).

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Why You Should Read It: To tell you the truth, I didn’t find this book that scary. Unnerving would be a better description. All The Hearts You Eat is one of the best pieces of tonal writing that I’ve ever read, and Piper keeps her readers unsettled from the first page to the last, lulled into spells of doomed complacency by the gentle rhythm of the prosaic ocean. The atmosphere and detailing here are exceptional. And yes, it’s gross, and yes, things escalate to hell and back, but at its core, this book never loses sight of the delicate psychological inquiry beneath it all.

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Why You Should Read It: This book made me feel so nauseous that I had to curl up in a ball and watch cat videos for three hours before I felt able to move. What makes this book exceptional is that the entire time I spent with these noxious girlies, the more I felt like I recognized them from horrible toxic relationships (thankfully behind me) in my own life. If there’s fiction to be written about the utter abhorrent depths of abuse and toxicity that human beings can go to, May Leitz has put forth an excellent effort.

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Why You Should Read It: The prose in this book may be simple, but it tells a crystal clear story about the dangers of blurring fiction and reality, losing oneself in one’s work, and the self-destruction inherent to how many approach writing. I’ve cooled on this one since my initial reaction, but I still really love the way Dorsch approaches her protagonist’s psyche and how it unfurls across the page.

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Why You Should Read It: There are two kinds of pulp fiction – pulp that you read because of the plot, and pulp that you read because of the prose. Arbacauskas’ writing falls firmly into the latter. Every sentence is delicate, every detail is sharp, and there is a distinct pleasure in simply lingering in the world created here, even if the story itself never comes fully to the fore. If you read for the joy of the act, then you’ll adore this book.

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Why You Should Read It: Greaves has built a brand for herself off of taking classic tropes of the TG/TF and forced-feminization genres and putting an elevated and feminist spin upon them, and I would argue that Kimmy is her best work to date. This book takes a viciously dark look at the power dynamics and psychological trauma implicit in many “man turned into sex doll” stories, and the result glitters with the violence of it. As a portrait of depersonalization and alienation, it’s close to flawless.

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Why You Should Read It: Good, fluffy, lighthearted fun with monster girls and some comfy erotica. If you want something nice and easy to read, or felt somewhat (extremely) offput by some of the trigger warnings on the other books, then Topaz is a great way to enjoy the good Halloween spirit without ruining your night. I also have a soft spot for this book, it was one of the first ones I read for this project and I’ve been looking for a reason to come back to it.

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Why You Should Read It: This book has some really interesting commentary about what happens to death when it becomes reversible, and fungible. Death-as-sex-as-commodity. What ensues is a very strange low sci-fi erotic horror novella that treats its own world so matter-of-factly that you can almost forget that the basic premise is that society has been reordered around trans communist furries who participate in the hyperkink scene.

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Why You Should Read It: Madden’s got a string of novellas coming out over the next few months, and for a first effort, this one is great. Sharp prose and a sharper pen keep this novella gripping. It’s like a mashup of the Stepford Wives and Us, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

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Why You Should Read It: This book doesn’t fit super comfy on this list, but I think it’s a really important meta-analysis of these books as a corpus, and a worthy consideration of why transness is such a fertile ground for horror fiction. Miren and Rumfitt both bring really excellent perspective, and I also especially appreciated the inclusion of Natalia Santana Mendes’ voice at the end. If you’re a trans horror junkie, you should definitely check this out.

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And that’s a wrap! Happy Halloween all, and I hope you found a good book to keep you occupied tomorrow ❤ Again, is there a transfemme horror novel you think I should read? Do you have a favorite book not mentioned here? Put it in the comments!

With much love, Beth

LAST WEDNESDAY: #6 – 15 Black Transfeminine Novelists You Should Read

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #8 – Observing Trans Day of Remembrance