Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a Transphobic Novella
What makes a novella by a self published author worth a read? Is it the uniqueness? Is it niche appeal? Maybe a strange perspective from an outsider? All valid reasons to take interest in something but not to justify reading it. A novella is no different than a book. Self publishing is only different in that is rightly looked down on. The quality is abysmal nine times out of ten. In the age of niche indie publishers, there is always someone interested in even the weirdest shit. The difference is they still have to pass the bar of readability. Before the news broke of Peters’s novella getting published by Random House, at least according to her website, I would have cited this as an example of the above paragraph. It started as a self published “work.” Now, I question why RH would pick this novella? It’s not good at all. My cynical self says, ‘it’s because the author is trans and they need representation numbers to show in marketing.’ Maybe it’s the novella’s alleged popularity. They say for a record deal, you don’t need talent. All you have to do is sell the first 30,000 records on your own. Maybe that’s the trick of it with books. Anyway, on to this shit show.
Before I begin this in review in earnest I want to say that if you want to read this book, go ahead. It’s a mood piece that is appealing to your inner teenage angst. It’s a lot like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac in a sense. More on that later. If you want something that skips the intellectual and goes straight to the angst, by all means give it a read. It’s not the worst novella I’ve ever read (that honor goes to The Masker), but it is bad and it is childish. So I guess it’s only the second worse novella I’ve ever read.
Now if you’re someone who loves this book, do yourself a favor and don’t read this essay a line further.
Summary
Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is a novella by Torrey Peters. Duh. I was told before reading it that the novella was about a world in which a virus makes everyone have to take hormones in order to breed; it effectively forcing humanity into the same medical situation as trans people. The story takes place in happened afterwords. Now if that sounds like a interesting novella, let me know if you ever find it. Cus this ain’t it, fam.
The novella also bills itself as being about some fearless leader type, quote “[Lexi]’s a charismatic trans woman furious with the way she sees her trans friends treated by society and resentful of the girl who spurned her love. Now, Lexi has a plan to wreak her vengeance.” If this sounds a bit like incel rage, you would not be wrong. But this also is not what the book is really about.
Infect, as I’m gonna call it for short, is about not getting over an ex. Not from the perspective of Lexi. We never see her perspective. We see it from our dull as dishwater protagonist whose name I can’t even remember and can’t be bothered to look up, if she even had a name. The book is almost like a reverse Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All the good memories of this miserable relationship have been erased and yet the main character still has feelings for the deeply unlikeable, stereotypical cult leader and harbinger of the apocalypse. Charismatic she is not. Grating and cringe worthy is what Lexi is.
Marginalized Slim Choices
If you’re part of a marginalized group it’s hard to find art made by and for your community. A good example is how finding queer representation is a struggle, especially in the past. In the 80s and early 90s, word of mouth and self published zines were all you had. But if you did make anything and someone else read it / saw it and told a friend, you could corner a near nonexistent market. So anyone from the group making art naturally gets a lot of attention from that community, regardless of quality or intent. Queer and trans people are desperate to see themselves in a protagonist. To be the hero of a story. So does it really matter who gives you that as long as you have it? Does it matter if it’s a shit show of self hate and childish fantasies? To me, yes, it does.
The Author
The best way to describe Torrey Peters is to just quote her directly. In an interview with Them.com, Torrey says “I love trans women, but they drive me fucking crazy… Trans women are fucked up and flawed, and I’m very interested in the ways in which trans women are fucked up and flawed.” The problem is how Peters shows us this in her novellas. The best way to demonstrate this is to quickly, and I do mean as quickly as I can possibly make it, touch one of her other novellas; The Masker.
To paraphrase Noah Caldwell-Gervais from his Ghost Recon Wildlands review and adapt it to this… thing, “[The Masker] is only [70 pages] but they cumulatively add up to an eternity of torture, so it feels longer.” The Masker follows a bland, lemming of a protagonist who is torn between a drunken stereotype of a self hating boomer trans woman and a perverted creep who dresses like Miss Meatface. The details make it so much worse. If you had told me this novella was written by J.K. Rowling and based off of a 4chan green text story, I would believe you. Do yourself a favor and burn the memory of this brief mention from your psyche so you aren’t tempted to read it. Don’t do it even if just for the cringe worthy experience.
Peters’s philosophy of “trans women are fucked up” is not one of exploration of mental illness, trauma, or the admiration of a flawed artist archetype. In these novellas trans women aren’t talked about the way we might talk about Henry Darger, Vincent Van Gogh, or Emperor Norton. These novellas feel like mean spirited stereotypes hidden in a heart-print gift wrapping of ‘trans sisterhood.’ To put it succinctly, it’s “I mocked you viciously because I care. I make fun of you because I love you.”
JTHM
These novellas, especially this one, have the same vibe as Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. It’s an angsty piece for the angsty reader. It’s all emotion and no sense, filled with flat caricatures instead of real characters. They are revenge fantasies on a certain type of person. They speak to the heart and not to the head. But JTHM was fun, it was playful, it was batshit insane, and above all else it was creative with something so childish. What separates Vasquez from Peters, besides talent, is that there is a self awareness to all his insanity. It’s not 4th wall breaking but you get lots of winks and nudges. This is a show put on for you and not something that takes itself seriously. Invader Zim, his most celebrated and well known work, is a magnificent bit of self satirizing. Peters novellas are so self serious they become almost laughably bad.
The Plot
The plot is told piecemeal in vignettes that jump back and forth in time. Rather than recall them in that way, I’ll simply summarize it in chronological order. Lexi and the protagonist have a one night stand. Lexi is a clingy loser and our protagonist is a college kid who had a hot girlfriend but feel dejected after coming out.
We next go to Seattle, where our protagonist (whose name I can’t remember, supposing she even had one) is living. Lexi appears uninvited, out of nowhere like a clingy childish stalker and layabout, to crash on her couch. One problem. It’s not really the protagonist’s place. Being the super hot, cis passing, white middle class wunderkind, our protagonist has a sugar daddy. One so rich he can afford to pay for a studio in Seattle for his mistress. And what do you know? Tonight is payday, so Lexi needs to just leave for a night. Lexi responds by having a drunken temper tantrum. She throws every cliché at the wall. It ends with Lexi accusing the protagonist of being abusive and all the usual cancelling bullshit. Thus, our protagonist is now isolated from the trans community.
Years pass and we hear nothing. Lexi has vanished into the plot’s aether. We get snippets of how bad Lexi made the narrator’s life. Eventually the two run into each other on a beach. Lexi, commanding her soon to be hench-women, negs the protagonist and chucks a ball at her head. The protagonist interprets this bullying behavior as a sign that she is forgiven. Forgiven for rightfully kicking a creepy, drunken stalker out of her apartment so she wouldn’t be made homeless.
Flash forward again to the fateful night. Our protagonist is chilling at Lexi’s poly cult of, in the words of the author, ‘bricks.’ Now I had never heard this word before reading this book but a ‘brick’ is a derogatory word for a trans woman who doesn’t pass for cis. It’s used primarily within the trans community. The author refers to the poly cult as “masonry,” as in a bunch of bricks sticking together. Once again a term I have never heard before. This is one of those weird lines getting crossed. It’s less relevant to the plot and more Peters’s personal venting. This is her view of trans women that don’t pass for cis; a bunch of losers who cling together because nobody else wants them. Classy.
As the night goes on, Lexi brags about manipulating a poor science major into making her doomsday weapon. The U Dub student spends her time getting perpetually high off bootleg acid she makes in the labs. I shit you not. Our mad scientist, that the villain has employed to make the ultimate virus, is getting stoned off moonshine drugs yet somehow made a virus that will infect the world. What? I could give leniency to one professor making a virus, but a stoner college kid is pushing it too far.
Lexi, betraying our protagonist and revealing that this fake peace was just a ruse, injects her with the virus. Like a child throwing a yet another tantrum, rather than justify what she’s done, she races into her room and locks the door. The cherry on top, yet again I shit you not, is her blasting generic, nondescript metal music to drown out the protests of the protagonist. The stoner mad scientist begs her to stay at their place as they’ve suddenly got cold feet. Shouldn’t you have thought of that before you made the virus, dipshit? Instead, narrator storms off into the night where brodudes harass her and she infects them. Peters will forever be marked as a fraud and a hack for failing to make the protagonist shout, “From hell’s grim heart, I cough on thee!” It would have been perfect. This is the linear end of the book, by the way.
Flash forward years later and the protagonist is a survivor of some post apocalyptic societal breakdown. Now if you’ve seen Children of Men, you’re probably expecting a fascist state, radical rebels who are willing to blow shit up, and an obsession to find the cure. And if coronavirus has taught us anything, the reality is that we’d get sent home for a year and then be expected to just carry on like nothing happened. But in this world, we skip straight to Mad Max. The result is a world which promoted trans people from a marginalized group hated by bigots to public enemy number one hated by all of humanity. We get some exposition about how bad hormones caused fevers. That’s about it.
We cut to the midwest. The protagonist is about to be robbed by highwaymen when one turns on the others and rescues her. This person turns out to be a trans woman. She is taken to the compound of the new incarnation of Lexi’s Doomsday Cult, where fearless leader Lexi reigns supreme,… but if anyone asks it’s a nontheatrical, anarchist, poly, nonbinary collective. One that just so happens to take orders from Abaddon, lord of the pit. For reasons we do not understand nor are explained, the two reconcile and begin to scheme to steal an estrogen producing pig from the hormone farms.
If you’re familiar with factory farming, you’d know this would be a massive, heavily guarded facility probably run by Bayer or Pfizer. No doubt there would be guard towers and patrols to secure the genetically altered pigs. Pigs that somehow produce human hormones which are harvest in a way that is never explained. No. You would be wrong if you guessed this. It’s a dudebro ranch run by a bunch of stereotypical chuds. Fade to black. Fin. The fuck did I just read?
This plot is a series of non sequiturs. Just a jumble of ideas penned out in a journal while at a bar, edited and strung together. It’s not the nonlinear story telling that fucks it up. It’s that characters are second to plot beats. Plot beats that vary in relevancy and importance. Character motivation scenes are not the same as character developing scenes. The motivation and backstory are plot elements. How a character interacts and reacts is just as important to both the plot and day to day life. There’s so little of that which isn’t a nondescript cliché. Our protagonist is treated badly for being trans. No shit. So? How does this define them? What about it? Lexi is a drunken buffoon. Is that it? She likes metal and wears combat boots. That’s so much character. Slow down there, buddy. This character is just too deep for me. Speaking of characters.
The Main Characters
Lexi
Lexi is at best a drunken ogre who has the maturity of a 12 year old. A woman who can’t stand rejection and refuses to face reality. At worst her worst she is the fucking antichrist. She starts multiple cults dedicated to the doomsday version of Die Cis Scum. It would not be out of character to have her say “Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! Seattle is my home. And I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of infectious trans women which will conquer the world!”
What are Lexi’s dreams, goals, even her fucking occupation? Who knows. If it was ever stated in the book, it was a throwaway line that got swept under the rug. Lexi is, above all else, Torrey Peters’s exes. I am not joking or being hyperbolic. I am 100% serious. This character has “fuck you, [name of ex she isn’t over]” written all over her. Revenge fantasies have been a huge contributor to literature. Dante Alighieri gained immortality by torturing people he didn’t like in hell and then coming down there to gawk at them. It can be done quite excellently. This book is the opposite of Dante’s Inferno. It is a whiny teenage revenge story in which Peters’s ex(es) are the source of all ruin, both in her life and for everyone else. Yet they also happen to be awesome in a way that is never properly articulated or shown to us. What personality trait did this cry baby drunkard have to garner a cult two times over? We’ll sure as shit never know. Hell, at the chronological start of the story the protagonist says she only hooked up with her out of desperation and loneliness.
What we’re left with is someone’s bizarre revenge fantasy that can’t quite make up its mind as to what this character is supposed to be. 90% of the time she’s a fucking shit weasel. 10% of the time she’s the golden child, chosen by god to lead the chosen people into the fucking dark ages.
The Protagonist (who?)
Did this protagonist even have a name? I can’t remember. I gave my copy away to a friend years ago. It used to be free to download via Peters’s website but according to her, as of Jan 2022, Random House is gonna publish a revised addition. Dear fucking god, why? Oh yeah, I almost forgot to talk about the protagonist. There is no protagonist. There is Torrey Peters narrating to us. She is the perfect pretty princess who just has to struggle enough to pass as trans. Her cis girlfriend lost interest in her at the chronological start, when she began to transition. She had to do some hoing to get a spot when she first moved to Seattle. A studio all to herself. Her hoing nets her a rich sugar daddy. She doesn’t have to do street work or even cam work. She deals with transphobes, duh. What does she do for a living? Fuck if I know. What kind of music does she like, does she have any friends, what does she do in her spare time, what are her political opinion besides “die cis scum I guess?” Who fucking knows. Not important. This character might have been left blank to be a reader insert, but there’s too much Peters in her to be one. If I had to sum up the protagonist in a single word, it’d be “prat.”
Her role is to be the righteous victim. Her only agency is to be a pawn like the sad waif she is. She’s oh so pretty, passing for cis except for when the plot needs her to be outed, and everyone unjustly hates her cus of Lexi being a psychopath. Oh woe is our unnamed narrator.
What the Hell Was This?
Infect somehow became a pop hit within a small segment of the trans community. It’s a revenge fantasy, both on an ex and society. It’s about trans women, a rarity in and of itself. It was written by a trans women. It was an easy sell. What we were sold was shit. It was a bad book through and through. A self hating, transphobic and trans misogynistic book. It had an ill conceived plot. It’s focus was not on some scifi post apocalypse or trans revenge against the world plot. That was secondary and barely elaborated on. It wasn’t a romance story, the characters don’t do much romancing. They look back and go “wouldn’t it have been nice?” Nice if what? If Lexi wasn’t a psychopath? If the nameless narrator was a person and not a view point? What exactly was it these two shit birds have? Nada.
This book is jumbled notes, half baked ideas, and a teenager’s angsty revenge story against an evil ex. I cannot and will not stress “teenage angst” enough because that’s the entire fucking novella in two words. It was a waste of my money and time. I understand why Torrey Peters is propped up. Who is her competition? I can’t name that many trans authors who write about trans women in science fiction. Perhaps as more authors, real authors, get popular and their works explode, we can look back on this dumpster fire and laugh. Wasn’t it funny when this thing was popular? But in the today world, it’s sad. It’s depressing that this is what’s on the table and not much else. If you take anything away from this, then it’s to hold bad writers in contempt no matter who they are or who they cater to. Infect is a shit novella. The Masker is a fucking joke. I don’t want to even read the rest of her shit. Being trans is enough today. You actually have to be good if you want to make it into tomorrow.
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