It’s time for the second annual Willy Literary Awards. I read 52 books this year, listed below.

About the winner: Manhunt is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel about a zombie virus that infects people with enough testosterone, turning virtually all cis men, a solid chunk of trans men, some trans women, women with PCOS, and others into raping, murderous zombies. There is a fascist TERF governmental force annihilating trans women and the story follows a group of trans women as they harvest testicles from the zombies to make estrogen and otherwise struggle and fight to survive in a hateful world. From this difficult premise, Gretchen Felker-Martin weaves magic with a sickeningly relentless action-packed narration that manages to shed light on the complexities of womenhood, trans sexuality, gendered violence, and the politics of survival. Liberal tenderqueers stay away. If you are faint of heart, stay away. This book is brutal without being gratuitous with its violence. Even its most earth-shatteringly fucked up rape scenes propel the narrative forward, facing a terrible world unblinkingly. This book has received much undeserved criticism from readers whose traumatophobia prevents them from sitting with the discomfort and pain Felker-Martin offers. Through her extreme premise, Felker-Martin breaks a visceral path into a felt understanding of gendered violence. This viscerality in her approach breaks through cliched, sentimental equally traumatophobic master narratives of what gendered violence is and who we are after experiencing it. Felker-Martin’s victims are broken but undefeatable. They will never heal but they will always survive and grow. A friend and I used to joke about being so excited to take down the patriarchy and learning all the ways women would oppress people. What’s funny is that Manhunt isn’t a book that reduces men to monsters, even though that’s literally the premise. Rather, through cuttingly honest and heartbreaking scenes, Felker-Martin shows how queer folx and women sometimes replicate violent schemata in their communities. Its honest conversations about the ways queer and feminist communities sometimes fails us made me feel seenin a way all the books worried about having the correct politics never do. With acerbic wit and down-to-earth moments, Felker-Martin’s characters felt like real people I have met and known.