Review: You Weren't Meant to Be Human

You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Many horror novels are written in response to real-world horrors, and that's definitely the case with this one. It's stated in the first (one-sentence) chapter:

Crane doesn't know this yet, but he's been pregnant for almost three months already.

There you go. Character established and themes stated in one fell swoop. A pregnant trans man is a difficult thing indeed, in a country where the federal right to abortion has fallen and trans people are being persecuted. Add in an apparent alien Hive, an ugly slimy mass of flies and worms that takes up residence in back rooms and recruits humans to do its bidding, and you have visceral horror on more than one level.

(There are explicit content warnings at the beginning of this book. PAY ATTENTION TO THEM. They are accurate. If you have trouble with graphic violence and gore, self-harm, dubious consent, abuse, domestic violence, forced pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion and childbirth, do not tackle this book.)

Crane is our protagonist, a mute (by choice) autistic trans man who is more than a little fucked up, who left home and found a sort of refuge with a hive in Washville, West Virginia and its humans. (The Appalachian country and mindset is something the author obviously knows well, and is depicted well enough to become a secondary character.) Crane's sort-of boyfriend, Levi, is a domestic abuser and manipulator who is also the hive's enforcer, tracking down and terminating anyone who tries to flee. Crane and Levi have a disturbing, twisted relationship that Crane nevertheless does not want to leave. He has found what he considers a place with the hive, and he wants to stick with the life he's made.

But that life is upended when he discovers he's pregnant.

This book is set a little bit in the future, as ten unnamed states have passed laws declaring abortion to be murder, and West Virginia is evidently one of them. (Although I can easily see that happening in real life. Conservatives are never content with merely restricting and/or banning abortion; they inevitably want to prosecute and imprison women for it.) Crane does not want the child, and attempts to flee to some friends in DC who can set him up with an abortion. Unfortunately, the night before the procedure is scheduled, he is tracked down by another hive's enforcer, who we gradually find out is an experiment--he's little more than a bunch of mature worms in a human suit. Stagger, as Crane names him, forces him to return to Washville. There, Levi tells Crane the hive wants him to have the baby, so he will have the fucking baby.

The rest of the book follows Crane through the forced pregnancy, the discomforts and pains of which are described in graphic terms. In Crane's case, this is complicated by his growing gender dysphoria--he can hardly stand his breasts getting bigger, for example. He also finds out that Levi has impregnated others, and there is a bloody scene of a self-induced abortion that nearly results in the girl bleeding to death. All through the pregnancy, Crane wonders why the hive is doing this. We don't find out till the very end, after the child--a girl--is born, and Crane realizes the hive is going to set her up to be a breeder, just as they have done with him.

The book's climax is the most gruesome part of all, and yet we understand why Crane does what he does. (I won't go into detail; suffice to say that this shares a plot point with Toni Morrison's Beloved.) He also takes out Levi with a hammer, and tears the hive into little alien bits. Finally, he flees back to his parents, who stumbled across him at a Washville gas station while he was in labor. (I appreciated that the author did not depict his parents as abusive; Crane's issues are the result of a world that will not accept what he is, which is why he tried to find a home with the hive.)

This book is raw, in your face, and takes no prisoners, and I'm sure some will decry it as over-the-top. But with the road this country is currently taking, we need stories that lay out the true horrors of what they are doing. The author does not flinch in portraying these horrors, and we should not look away.

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