Fuck

I think I just read my favorite horror book of the year

I didn’t sleep much last night.

In fact, I’m not sure I slept at all. I’m writing this through a fugue of exhaustion and the world is swimming at the edges. There are three reasons for this. The first is ambient anxiety. We live after all in a tumultuous times and it is impossible to go online without reading something that makes you pause, double check the sources, and mumble softly about how the writers for this season of earth has jumped the shark so many times, the damn marine animals have unionized to ask for more pay.

The second reason is Big Orange, a very unrepentant cuddle monster spent a good chunk of the night trying to cuddle me without my consent; there is a scar now along my cheek from where she tried to latch onto my face for the hugs she wanted me to give regardless of my feeling on the subject.

The third reason is Andrew Joseph White’s adult debut You Weren’t Meant to be Human.

Oh my god.

Like, fuck me, I’m still fumbling for the right words to describe the experience and how propulsive the prose was, how relentless the pacing. Inexorable as a locust swarm and twice as hungry. A book that crawls under your skin and sneaks into your heart, sinks its teeth into your lungs and won’t. let. go.

You Weren’t Meant to be Human is the story of an Earth that isn’t very different from the one we occupy, where reproductive freedom has been taken away, and the marginalized find themselves in a place where it’s easier, simpler to maybe, sometimes say yes when festering swarms of alien worms and flies offer you a home with them. Because with these insect horrors, there is acceptance. With these horrifying creatures, there is permission to pursue your own humanity.

The protagonist is a young trans man named Crane, who is both autistic and mute, and who serves one of these hives alongside his lover, a charismatic ex-soldier who is more than happy to indulge Crane’s messiest kinks. (There’s so much here alone already that I love. How White explores the reasons self-destructiveness can be so appealing to a person, how trauma informs that, how people take advantage of the coping mechanisms that arise, how we talk ourselves into believing that it’s okay because that’s what we want right? Because we find it hot, right?) And for a little while, life is okay for Crane, even though so much of it involves murdering people so the insects have fresh corpses to eat.

Except then his lover gets him pregnant.

Crane, to be clear, does not want to be pregnant. Unfortunately, the hive wants him to carry this child to term. And so much of the book deals with his horror at his fate, the dysphoria, his absolute terror at his body not only rebelling against its understanding of what it should be but also reshaping due to an unwanted alien presence. Without spoiling anything, it’s a dark fucking read. White pulls no punches in depicting Crane’s anguish and all of it eventually crescendos into an ending so epic, so bloody, so utterly and stunningly holy shit I can’t believe the book went there, I feel a little bit bad about how cathartic I found it all.

You Weren’t Meant to be Human is a snarl of a book, messy and mean and shameless about its acknowledgment that humanity is too complicated for simple boxes, unapologetic about the fact none of us are angels, that we make bad choices sometimes even in the best of times; a red-toothed and spiteful shriek at the world; it says that there is a choice at the end of the end of everything even if that choice is terrible, it is still a choice that you can make. That there is autonomy and agency no matter how external parties might try to scoop them from our guts. That when the gore hits the wall, queer people won’t simply curl up and die. That we’re going to survive whatever the world throws at us.

Good goddamned god.

Pre-order this, please. Now.

As always, a cat photo.