Title: Getting Even: Prank War
Author: M.C. Questgend
Publisher: M.C. Questgend
Publication Date: October 4, 2020
Genres: Erotic Horror
Shelves: Female-authored, transgender
While there’s no doubt that M.C. Questgend has written some dark stories over the years, some painful tales of characters challenged and betrayed, Getting Even: Prank War is a whole other level of erotic horror. It’s a story that has its roots in Carrie-like teenage humiliation, but the consequences are even more horrific, and the revenge that follows even more fitting.
Chris is a prodigy, a brilliant young man who, in skipping grades, has become intellectually alienated from kids his age and emotionally alienated from his peers. All he wants to do is finish high school, give his graduation speech, and head off to Harvard on a full scholarship. When he refuses to help one of the popular girls cheat on her exams, however, she sets him up for a feminization prank that was only intended to be humiliating. but which ends up costing him his scholarship and ruining his future.
As the old adage goes, revenge is a dish best served cold, and Chris takes his time setting up the perfect scenario, weaponizing the memories of his humiliation, and studying all things feminine to become Christine. It’s creepy the way he spies on the four friends behind the graduation prank, and unnerving the way he puts so much effort into drawing them into the perfect environment, but the true horror is in what she does to them.
This is one of those stories that isn’t afraid to push its themes to the most horrifying conclusions. Questgend holds nothing back, showing absolutely no remorse in enabling Christine’s dark, disturbing, increasingly sexual cruelties. This is erotic horror in the truest sense of the word, crossing lines and boundaries along the way, that leaves the reader ever more uncomfortable.
Where stories like this usually fall apart is in the ending, but Getting Even: Prank War never lets up. It goes places I did not expect and throws in a few twists that genuinely shocked me. What’s perhaps most disturbing about it, however, is how much depth there is to Chris/Christine’s character and how much empathy Questgend is able to evoke in the reader, making us feel complicit in the ultimate horrors. Fearsomely fantastic stuff.
Rating: ♀ ♀ ♀ ♀ ♀
My sincere thanks to the author for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
Beauty in Ruins 