YOU WEREN'T MEANT TO BE HUMAN, if the title chills you wait'll you read the story

YOU WEREN'T MEANT TO BE HUMAN
ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE
Saga Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Alien meets Midsommar in this chilling debut adult novel from award-winning author Andrew Joseph White about identity, survival, and transformation amidst an alien invasion in rural West Virginia.

Festering masses of worms and flies have taken root in dark corners across Appalachia. In exchange for unwavering loyalty and fresh corpses, these hives offer a few struggling humans salvation. A fresh start. It’s an offer that none refuse.

Crane is grateful. Among his hive’s followers, Crane has found a chance to transition, to never speak again, to live a life that won’t destroy him. He even met Levi: a handsome ex-Marine and brutal killer who treats him like a real man, mostly. But when Levi gets Crane pregnant—and the hive demands the child’s birth, no matter the cost—Crane’s desperation to make it stop will drive the community that saved him into a devastating spiral that can only end in blood.

You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is a deeply personal horror; a visceral statement about the lives of marginalized people in a hostile world, echoing the works of Stephen Graham Jones and Eric LaRocca.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is this story literally intended to be about a hive...powerfully coded culturally as an insect-related word...that controls people to their detriment? Are the hives metaphors for the horrors of cishet society demanding conformity of people not like them? Are the hives infestations of the criminal organizations demanding obedience of the Appalachian people in exchange for the smallest amount of human dignity...or else?

Yes.

The answer is none/all/a combination of these and more. This is why I rate the body horror story as highly as I do. Author White is avowedly transmasc. The story could've been his own; he could be Crane; the body horror could be, is, intensely personal. It is laid out in terms of Crane's quest for bodily autonomy, its various phases and faces of denial and deprivation of this great, fundamental freedom. Trading transphobia for misogyny is not trading up. It is still the imposition of ignorance on top of your own knowledge, the unwillingness of the uneducated to do the work of acquiring the information needed to distinguish between discomfort and threat.

The hive isn't precise or even visible, it's a shifting...space...delineated by rotten stinking meat and a control mechanism brutally physical and insidiously psychological. This is the essence of horror to me. The ugly inner workings of systems of control and brutalization for dominance assertion. The denial of the fundamental freedom, autonomy...self-determination...that all Others endure. That is, throughout time and space, the one sin qua non of horror stories. It gives me shivers even conceptualizing it.

What Author White does best in this story is mobilize all the tropes of horror to embody the reality of an authoritarian world. What the alluring promises of it devolve into. What the systems of oppression will resort to in order to accomplish their hidden aims. Are they even hidden, or are we simply discouraged from noticing them? Accused of being paranoid, thereby handily Othered in an uncontestable way?

The way the story ends, I won't say "wraps up" it's too easy, isn't heartening or triumphal or celebratory. It is instructive. It is condign. It does not spare a thought for the offense against "nice"ness it's made you endure. And surprisingly made you...appreciate, since enjoy is a completely wrong stop to pull on Literature's pipe-organ.

I think this read will titillate the horror seeker, educate the knowledge seeker, and validate the entomophobic person's visceral rejection of reeking, rotting things for what they harbor.