Book Review: The Trophy Wife Hunt by Courtney Captisa

Title: The Trophy Wife Hunt

Author: Courtney Captisa

Publisher: In Your Dreams Publishing

Publication Date: October 8, 2020

Genres: Erotic Horror

Shelves: Female-authored, transgender

A contemporary homage to The Most Dangerous Game, the 1920s classic story of men hunting men, The Trophy Wife Hunt follows the same plot structure, but with a gender-swapped spin on the characters.

Jake is an ordinary guy who falls off a cruise ship while proposing to his girlfriend, washing ashore on a secluded island owned by a mad scientist with a fetish not just for hunting, but for making the perfect trophy wife. Surrounded by the grotesque reminders of his previous failures, Dr. Iterola is all too happy to explain his bizarre scheme and even more bizarre chemical concoction before releasing Jake into the wild, where he will slowly become Jacqueline over the course of the three-day hunt.

Although Courtney Captisa has done dark fiction before, most notably with her Halloween-themed See/See 2 stories, the darkness of this, particularly with the grotesque failed transformations of those who came before Jake, was a macabre surprise. Even knowing how the original story ended, there’s still plenty of tension here in discovering how Jake/Jacqueline evades capture while facing off against the mad doctor and his deformed puppets. The chase across the island itself is a genuine thrill, and the ambush aboard the doctor’s yacht (the cleverly-named Sandy Thomas) is almost as good as the final confrontation.

In following such a well-known story, the true appeal of The Trophy Wife Hunt is not so much in how it ends but in how it plays out. It’s the details that make it unique, and the little twists and tweaks that keep it exciting.

Rating: ♀ ♀ ♀ ♀

My sincere thanks to the author for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.