Book Review: "You Weren't Meant to Be Human" by Andrew Joseph White

Somebody needs to check on this author because honestly, what the hell did I just read? This book starts pretty uncomfortable and just gets more and more uncomfortable from then on. The storyline has its ups and downs, the characters are somewhat stocky and yet, the book itself is still compelling. Is it the writing that does it? Well, there's an apparent lack of atmosphere throughout the novel, so I don't believe so. Is it the characterisation of these people who serve as clear tropes for quite obvious things? Possibly not. Well, I can tell you what it is. Here's the thing, if I have said it once, I've said it a million times: a successful horror novel needs to have simplicity at its core. Too many random tangents and you get the reader mixed up and the horror quite literally drains from the book. The author's biggest advantage was his simplicity.

The story starts with us being introduced to a transman by the name of Crane. He's made a weird trade-off - he is in 'The Hive' instead of the outside world (which can treat him with troubling discomfort by no fault of his own). The promise of The Hive is that a strange and gruesome organism offers a chance at change whilst demanding loyalty. I'm not going to lie, if this didn't pull me in, as someone who loves folk horror and body horror then I honestly would've had to recheck myself. From the outset it seemed like there was definitely an aspect of me trusting the author. I needed this to be a bumpy ride. Though the story itself is a simple one, the expansive nature to which the author has taken it and built outwards is admirable. Crane serves as our 'hook' character - someone we project on to at first, but sometimes we think is awful shifty too.

Within the Hive, Crane finds this sort of comforting feeling that the outside world does not give him (as you can see, we are definitely getting Wicker Man vibes here - or possibly Midsommar too). However, in a torrid and horrifically violent affair, Crane finds himself pregnant with the baby of an unreliable Levi. Levi is mean, often abusive and away for lengthy amounts of time. He is the opposite to our hook character because he serves as a man with a martyr complex - he definitely has more going on but his treatment of Crane is enough for, at the beginning, the reader to be more judgemental of him. I'm desperately trying not to give too much away because if you love body horror then you will find this book astounding. It does so much with such a focused storyline.

Crane is of course, fighting his own biology. As a transman, birthing a child must be a traumatic event but the Hive is demanding he carry it to term - which is horrifying in itself. The reader feels each knot in the stomach, each twist of the throat, each scene of extreme violence and each thought of suicide. This book is graphic as it is philosophically nightmarish, which makes it an almost perfect read.

There is a definite underlying metaphor about how marginalised people's bodies are treated as political battlegrounds, it is well in the public discourse at the moment as well - transpeople are always the topic of a conversation they don't have a voice in. They are treated almost as non-people with the whole 'bathroom argument' being blown into new worlds by the stupidest people with the loudest voices. If you want to know my opinion here it is: I like transpeople and think they should be allowed to do as their gender dictates. Yep, I'm a "transwoman are women and transmen are men" person. If you don't like that, I honestly don't care. But the author does a fantastic job of turning the politicisation of the body into a gory horror as we are made to confront, as readers, the true length to which we may be complicit in the treatment of Crane whilst we also long to save him from his ordeal.

This book was fantastic. Simplistic with depth of metaphor, brilliantly formed characters that though, are clearly tropes - they were explored in real and visceral depth and, on top of all of this we got some real gore and body horror. I will say that if you are sensitive to body horror then you probably want to avoid this book because that is probably the least terrifying thing about it. I'm glad to see real horror novels still exist.