Brainwyrms

Alison Rumfitt

2023-10-05

Frankie, a trans woman whose workplace has been bombed by a TERF terrorist, is numbing her pain with kinky sex and drugs; Vanya, a non-binary teen runaway, satisfies their secret fucked-up urges while living in precarious housing. When they meet, the trajectories of both of their lives are changed irreversibly. The world is pure Rumfitt: fascism, transphobia and misogyny intersect and feed off each other in a vicious, parasitic cycle of internalised and externalised hate, festering and eating away at everything until only violent and self-destructive drives remain.

This book is vile and impossible to recommend and I loved it: a maelstrom of ambitious ideas that I will never fully shake myself of.