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A review by emilypoche
You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White

dark sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

3.75

Thank you to Saga Press for providing this ARC for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. 

You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White is a gnarly horror story. Gnarly is absolutely the right word for this one—it’s equal parts disturbing, dread inducing, and unimaginably gory. In lieu of providing my own trigger warnings in the review, I would refer to the very artful list included by the author at the start of the book. I will give a general blanket statement-if virtually anything that would be on a standard list of triggers bothers you, this one isn’t for you. 

I am of two minds about this book. On one hand, the body horror is exquisite. Every single thing is gross, shocking, and totally right for this dark near-future landscape. This books paints a dark, bleak, picture of the near future and then further drives it into oblivion. 

Although I don’t know if it was the author’s main goal, I think that this book is a great story where the hive stands in for high control groups (religions, cults, life insurance sales schemes.) The longer Crane stays in the group you realize they aren’t being fully transparent to him, he isn’t really getting much back for their sacrifices and extended torture, and it’s made everyone blind to what’s going on. This was a really successful and exaggerated way of talking about cults in a way that departs from the usual compounds and hairdos style. 

Where I felt like I had a different experience than my completely positive icky feelings was the world felt written in half measures. The mechanics of the worms and the hive are seemingly completely unknowable. How they “help” the group is sort of unknown, and it’s never explained what happens if they are in the light. How do they find people? Are they omniscient? Additionally, backstories are given in two sentence quips and give very little depth to the character. Even Crane felt at times like the explanations were somewhat ‘hand wave’ explanations. 

It’s a great, transgressive horror book with especially great transmasc representation. The forced birth horror is topical. I wish the world building was a little more complete and dynamic, because then it would have been a 5/5 for me. For now I’m going to give it a satisfied 3.75/5
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