Carol is the bartender on this ship. It’s a decent gig, and an escape from the transphobic trolls she’s been dealing with on the mainland. Things seem to be getting better for her, so of course the ship’s captain has to turn into an amorphous horror and shunt the whole vessel into a nightmare-dimension of violent mutations and alien energies. And things just get crappier from there. While the crew and passengers transform into monsters, Carol and her friends make their way through the literal bowels of the vessel to try to escape the flesh phantasmagoria. Or at least survive until it’s over.
F4 is a gonzo novella that reads like 70s New Wave pulp science fiction mixed with an 80s creature feature and a little bit of the SCP Foundation dropped into classic 1990s Doom.
The action on the Finasteride is broken up by scenes of the incident on the mainland that drove Carol to the ship in the first place. These chapters are slower and grounded in the mundane world, reading more like a crime thriller and providing a nice anchor to the craziness on the F4.
It’s refreshing to read a story about a transwoman front and center as the protagonist. Also refreshing to read a story about a transwoman that isn’t a prurient, often cis-authored, drama focused only her struggles with being trans. Though the transphobic bullshit Carol has to deal with is certainly not glossed over. She puts up with constant micro-aggressions- and a lot of regular aggressions, too. Heck, the reason she ended up on the ship in the first place was to get away from a concerted transphobic harassment campaign (which bears similarities to the way the media and trolls victimized Claudia Charriez during the assault trial of her ex- a deliberate parallel that Glasser herself pointed out in an interview).
Despite the hellscape erupting all around Carol, she remains focused as she tries to keep her companions safe. And as we see in the mainland story, she tries to do the right thing even when she knows it's going to bite her in the ass hard.
Carol is also not at all shy about her anatomy, which brings up one thing to be aware of when going into this novella: the dicks. Sweet Christmas, are there a lot of dicks. Girldicks. Kaiju dicks. Crab-monster dicks. Maybe even one or two cisguy-dicks. Dicks even become a major plot point. But you get used to it. Just go in expecting dicks and you’ll be fine.
The ending of F4 does feel like it needed more set-up. There’s an island shaman who pops up right at the end with hardly any foreshadowing. And Carol has some sort of epiphany regarding her relationship to the kaiju that I didn’t fully understand.
Overall, though, this is a fast, fun, action-heavy read good for folks who like pulp horror featuring protagonists who are just done with all this crazy monster shit. You can get a copy of F4 on Amazon, though I got mine at the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences store in Providence.
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