At the end of September, a report by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein indicated that the FBI was preparing to target trans people under the organization’s new threat category of “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” which is used to classify those who seek to undermine and destroy society itself through sewing chaos. Anyone paying attention to the anti-trans fear-mongering coming out of the United States—as well as the United Kingdom and the Western world in general—probably wouldn’t have been surprised by the news, although may have been by the category’s name, which has a bizarrely and somewhat thrillingly punk bent to it. Surely a trans woman somewhere is having the phrase stick-and-poked onto herself at this very moment. I can imagine one of the characters in Herculine, Grace Byron’s frightening and funny new debut novel, doing so. The moniker might be apt for some of them: the book revolves around a cultish all-trans commune that dives headfirst into the destructive and demonic.

The trans-cult novel feels particularly resonant given the political climate at the time of its release. Over the past decade, the conspiracy-minded perception of the trans community as some kind of an extreme, dangerous cult has gradually inched its way from the right-wing fringes of politics into the mainstream. It seems du jour that the FBI might classify trans people as Nihilistic Violent Extremists, or that U.S. Republicans and the president himself frequently decry the “transgender cult” and the “gender ideology cult.” In the U.K., lobbying groups and politicians are busy attempting to have “transgender ideology” classified as a cult as well. For the advocates of such a position, trans people and their supporters are preying on the vulnerable and ignorant, manipulating them into accepting premises that run contrary to social health and personal well-being. Just like a cult.

Except that isn’t really how a cult works. Cults are defined by the fact that they’re closed off from the rest of the world, with a high degree of control exercised on adherents. Control is the entire point. Cults work by trapping people into isolated, tiny worlds with promises of belonging, community, love, truth, maybe power. They target those who are very vulnerable and might be having difficulty finding their way in the world. For this reason, it seems more likely that trans people themselves would be the ones targeted by cults, for all their vulnerability as a community. This is the central premise of Herculine. Although it’s her first novel, Byron is experienced in the subject matter: much of her journalistic and critical writing has revolved around the absurd theatre of contemporary transphobia in the West; in a piece for The Nation, she writes about how the media eagerly seized on to the transness of some members of the Zizians, an AI-crazed murderous cult.

Herculine follows an unnamed trans woman living in New York City who has a lot of problems, a not-insignificant portion of which seem to stem from her living in NYC, which is as usual trying its hardest to push its residents into total precarity. She struggles with underemployment and with the irritating men she hooks up with; she is deeply envious of the writers around her who are making it, or at least pretending like they are. More concerningly, she is attempting to escape the pull of the demonic. When she was younger, she was subjected to traumatic religious conversion therapy, and still sees demons about town, in nightclub bathrooms and by her bed at night. All the while, her ex, Ash, a trans woman who she has a complicated history with, pleads with her to join the “all-trans rural commune” in Indiana she founded called Herculine. Eventually, when the protagonist’s prospects seem to run out, she decides to go, at least for a little bit, to see what it’s like. You don’t need to be familiar with the horror genre to know this cues the beginning of the end.

When the protagonist arrives at the commune, she finds herself tangled in a complex and deeply frustrating spiderweb of interpersonal dynamics. Things are a bit strange between her and Ash, who appears to have dived fully into the persona of charismatic cult leader. And she’s cut off from the rest of the world: her phone won’t get much signal out there, and soon she discovers that her car won’t start either. Our heroine’s tale spirals out from there, with demons, traumas and trans community drama converging to create a total nightmare.

The girls at the all-trans rural commune are just as traumatized as the protagonist is, with various histories of conversion therapy, familial abandonment and abuse. The protagonist cynically glosses over them as stereotypical trans-girl backstories, rolling her eyes at the trauma-bonding that seems to be an inherent aspect of the commune. Many of the girls are young, some having transitioned only recently. In short, they’re all very vulnerable, making them ideal candidates for being snatched up by a cult. Herculine plays off the idea of the trans cult, but this cult isn’t trying to turn people trans, or trying to force God-fearing Christians to use pronouns, or whatever Republicans think. Instead, trans people themselves are the targeted ones. This is a trans-cult scenario that feels more realistic and honest than what right-wing politicians fantasize about, even as the novel stretches the concept to a surreal point when demons begin to materialize.

It is significant that it’s a trans woman who is running Herculine and recruiting these girls, most of whom contribute in various ways to trapping one another and pushing the commune toward more and more extreme rituals. The danger comes from both outside of the community and within it. Outside lies the transmisogyny that can lead to poor access to healthcare and employment, abuse, isolation and mental health problems; within the community, the refraction of these factors can enhance a kind of lateral violence. They make it easier for trans women to hurt one another, and to accept circumstances that to most people would be seen as unacceptable.

In a world that repels and attempts to stamp out trans women, we frantically scrape together what we can get; try to carve out niches where we can survive amid society’s hostility. This involves a constant and ever-shifting process of negotiating what exactly the lesser evil is. Is a manipulative partner worth it in order to receive affection and love? Is a petty and slighting community worth it in order to receive belonging? Is a contract with the demonic worth it in order to be granted beauty and power? These are questions pondered not only by the women of Herculine, but by those in real life too (well, perhaps not the last one—hopefully).

In the world of Byron’s novel, the trade-offs seem extreme—trying to rationalize being stranded in rural Indiana with your cult-leader ex-girlfriend isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence—but there’s an honesty at the heart of them. Like everyone, the girls of the novel just want to be loved, financially stable and beautiful. Beneath the violence and horror that permeates the novel is a question: When the desperate and marginalized reality that trans women are pushed into is already far from normal, what can we be pushed to normalize in our quest to have our human needs and desires met? In Herculine, the answer seems to be practically anything, if the conditions are right. It’s an answer that’s both depressing and honest, and that serves as a warning, urging us to pay attention to the terms of the lives we accept.