Brand-New Trans Horror From Germany

Bosloh is a small, easy-to-miss town somewhere in the rural part of Lower Saxony. Surrounded by pastures, harvested cornfields, and clusters of dark copses, the thatched roofs of the respectable houses catch the eye. Behind their shadowy façades unfolds a claustrophobic narrative that packs a punch: Brian Frank’s literary debut “Please Come And Get Me” (Amazon-Affiliate-Link), due to appear on August 31 from Eichborn Verlag.
The author, Brian Frank, born in 1993, studied Creative Writing in Hildesheim and now lives in Hamburg. He already ventured into the themes of queer identity and rural horror in his previous novel, “Funfair” (Spaßpark, 2024). In “Please Come And Get Me,” he continues to explore these interwoven concerns: the story of Fabian, a thirty-year-old trans man who has just undergone a mastectomy. After a chaotic breakup, Fabian finds himself with little choice but to spend the healing weeks with his conservative family — even though contact since his coming out hasn’t gone smoothly. But how bad could it really be when you return to the long-neglected family home in Bosloh?

His family would never poison him, would they?

What unfolds over the three hundred-plus pages of “Please Come And Get Me” is, indeed, profoundly severe. It starts off quietly: Fabian’s phone disappears. Suddenly he must sleep all day after drinking from a provided water bottle, and he’s more exhausted than in a hospital; yet his family would never poison him, right? The clothes he brought aren’t washed because there’s enough in the closet — clothing he last wore as a teenage girl. A string of seemingly harmless coincidences gives way to a suspicion that will be brutalized into certainty. The family’s aim is to reconstruct their “lost daughter” — and in the process, to destroy Fabian.

“The Wissmanns,” Frank writes, “have lived in Bosloh for more than two hundred years and, until the marriage of the Kreyes from the neighboring town in late summer 1993, had avoided misfortune, living as content people with many healthy children and grandchildren, most never moving beyond a few villages, with the mayor, heath-queen pageants, and businesspeople, firmly rooted in politics, church, and the shooting club.” Frank’s precise depiction of the West German family idyll and the strong anchoring of the action in Bosloh are among my favorite aspects of the novel.

An Unresolved Trauma
Two antagonists come into focus: the young lover of Fabian’s father, Arla, who initially presents herself as the perfect trans ally; and Fabian’s uncle Steffen, a steadfast and charismatic police officer who was closer to Fabian than his own father, Thomas, who runs Wissmann Agricultural Machinery GmbH. Both men are beloved in the village, entangled with the police, emergency services, politics, school, and religious life.

Behind this public surface lies a trauma that has never been confronted, living in the dark corners of the old farm, a trauma that — as the narrative gradually reveals — has been handed down through generations to the daughters of the family. Grandmother, mother, and sister-in-law have all perished under traumatic circumstances. This history furnishes the perverse motive of Thomas, Arla, and Steffen: to force Fabian into “reversal” — they do not want to lose him. They do not see themselves as monsters (as one will eventually read them) but as ordinary people who simply want to help.

Fabian Is Not Sympathetic
Yet Fabian knows who he is. He is — and this is my second favorite aspect of the novel — not easy to like. Fabian is a deeply flawed, insecure, judgmental person who carries a “politically neutral” backpack and mocks the stickers and rainbow flags others wear to signal their identities. He congratulates himself on his ability to “pass,” not like other trans men who don’t care about that, and he’s not someone who claims he won’t be broken by misgendering.

Fabian is a real person, not a flawless victim. Despite all the odds — locked in his room, without car keys, a phone, clothes, or any people who might help him — he remains stubborn. He does not surrender to his fate; he fights back, grits his teeth, and, in the end, bears the scars that mark him.

Not a Novel That Shies Away From Pain

Horror and psychological thriller are natural vehicles for confronting marginalized life experiences — something American artists like Jordan Peele and Gretchen Felker-Martin have already demonstrated. The fact that these thematic intersections are now so precisely transposed into a distinctly German setting is genuinely welcome. The reading experience of “Please Come And Get Me” isn’t always enjoyable: it carves a deep cut and keeps rubbing salt into it, yet you simultaneously revel in how exquisitely painful it is. Any moment of calm — a quiet moment alone, a can of Diet Coke — feels like a huge relief, one Fabian never gets to savor for long. It isn’t a novel that avoids pain.

Brian Frank’s debut moves between psychological thriller and rural-pastoral and body-centered horror. These two strands culminate most intensely in the scene where Fabian must endure the draining procedure under a repulsively transphobic village doctor.

That would be less terrible if poorly informed village doctors, controlling families, and economic precarity were merely fictional. But Brian Frank’s novel “Please Come And Get Me” is powerful because it reflects real-life realities — crisply observed and dramaturgically developed in a novel we will be talking about for years. And Frank’s work is also a call to trans writers to go where it hurts. To endure the pain. Because only through that can we move forward.