Feminine rage is all the rage! At least according to the countless Goodreads shelves and reading lists that illuminate this publishing phenomenon. Woman serial killers, egomaniac anti-heroines with internal monologues and ethics à la Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, or Norman Bates, girl meets boy/girl chases boy/girl hurts boy narratives in a reversal of the familiar gender roles.
So let us visit a few of these recently published novels:
Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
Alice, a trans woman in her twenties, spends her life in her small apartment, stumbling through a fog of anhedonia ever since she entered a haunted house with her two best friends, but only one friend made it out with her alive. However, neither Alice nor her former best friend/occasional lover made it out unscathed. Alice has a scar gouged into her forehead, the miasmic ghost of Morrissey haunting her room’s wall posters, and nightmare-tinged occurrences that follow everywhere she goes as she tries to make sense of what happened inside the House.
This is a breath-holding, breath-stealing novel that is simultaneously brutal and tender. Although you witness the characters falling down dangerous rabbit holes of retaliation and ideologies that correspond with Britain’s rising wave of fascism and gender-critical feminism, you cannot help but empathize with the characters as they flail between rage, pain, and futility.
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
Irina, a female photographer who had once known small-scale fame but now struggles with feeling irrelevant and only having anonymous, seedy clients, scours the streets of Newcastle for strange-but-compelling looking men and boys to photograph. These garage studio photoshoots include nudity, bizarre props, and an air of exploitation that moves from the sphere of make-believe to pure, gritty realism as the novel progresses. Irina has no consideration for other people. She takes advantage of the best friend who is secretly in love with her, the local supermarket cashier who never had a girlfriend before her, as well as other people’s goodwill and generosity. But despite her self-obsession, she also engages in self-sabotage, including starving herself, putting herself in dangerous or uncontrollable situations, and eventually realizing that her brain is keeping something terrible from her. Something she has done that is impossible to be undone.
Irina struggles to leave her mark on the world, but even as she tries to fracture the world apart, it never seems to consider her a threat because of who she was born as.
Bunny by Mona Awad
Samantha is a creative writing scholarship student in a hyper-exclusive New England MFA program. She attends weekly Workshop with the Bunnies, a group of nauseatingly twee rich girls that wear kitten- and rainbow-patterned dresses and use catchphrases such as ‘I love you, Bunny/Bunny, I love you’ spoken as a creepy hivemind choir. Although Samantha feels derision toward the Bunnies and initially keeps her distance (while simultaneously objectifying them), she soon finds herself caught in her classmates’ destructive but all-encompassing orbit.
No one seems to be getting any writing done in the program, but not to worry! The Bunnies have a tradition of creating Drafts (also known as Darlings). These are rabbits stolen from the campus grounds, then sacrificed in a darkly hilarious sequence of spontaneous combustions to create Drafts—also known as Boys. The only problem is that these boys are rough drafts. They never seem to fully develop the necessary human anatomy and behavior (or be the romance heroes the Bunnies expect them to be), which leads to them often getting the axe (no, literally, those Darlings are Killed, and often). Until Samantha joins the Bunnies, and the draft-making process changes for good.
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
The titular Eileen is a disturbed young woman growing up in the early sixties. Living with her erratic, alcoholic father in a grimy house, she works in a correctional facility for boys, and spends her time lost in dark fantasies, shoplifting, and stalking those who catch her interest. One of her objects of obsession soon becomes the facility’s newest counselor, Rebecca. Their friendship soon evolves into something far more sinister, as Eileen spirals into a sinkhole of toxicity and complicity. This is a character study of a highly unlikeable, but also highly vulnerable, female protagonist. She becomes both recipient and perpetrator of misogyny and stifling oppression, and acts in ways that cannot fully place her as either the hero or the villain of her own story.
Sometimes this reversal of gender roles deconstructs and examines patriarchal and other societal structures, other times it recreates them uncritically—but, admittedly, in entertaining, often gory and absurd ways. It looks like the “melancholy, amoral woman protagonist” trend is here to stay (as it should).
