I loved what You Weren’t Meant to Be Human was trying to say more than I loved actually reading it. The concept is horrifying, the body horror is absolutely disgusting, and there are ideas about bodily autonomy, dysphoria, abuse, and survival here that hit HARD. But as much as I appreciated what Andrew Joseph White was doing, I never felt as connected to the story as I wanted to be.

Crane has found a strange kind of safety among the hives that have appeared throughout Appalachia. They offer people new bodies and new lives in exchange for loyalty and corpses, and for Crane, that means the opportunity to transition and exist in a way that finally feels survivable.

Then Crane becomes pregnant.

From there, the book turns pregnancy itself into horror. Crane does not want this happening to his body, but everyone around him seems more concerned with what his body can produce than what he actually wants. That loss of control is easily the most disturbing part of the book because underneath all the alien organisms, worms, gore, and increasingly horrific imagery is something painfully human.

And the body horror is NASTY. White absolutely commits to making the physical experience of this story uncomfortable. Bodies become things that can be invaded, altered, used, destroyed, and rebuilt. There were scenes that made me want to crawl out of my own skin, which is exactly what good body horror should be able to do.

Where it lost me was somewhere between all of those ideas.

There is so much happening thematically that I sometimes felt like I was engaging with what the book represented more than I was engaging with the actual story. I understood why everything was horrifying and what the horror was saying, but I didn't always feel emotionally pulled into it. For something this visceral, I expected it to hit me much harder than it ultimately did.

That makes this a weird one to rate because there are pieces of it I think are incredibly effective. I love how unapologetically disgusting it is. I love that its horror is angry and personal. And I especially love the way it takes something as intimate as ownership over your own body and asks what happens when everyone around you decides that ownership no longer belongs to you.