Books book reviews Andrew Joseph White’s You Weren’t Meant to Be Human Pushes a Lot of Buttons Alex Brown doesn’t chicken out of Andrew Joseph White’s intense first novel for adults. By Alex Brown | Published on September 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share I don’t really know what to do with a horror novel like Andrew Joseph White’s You Weren’t Meant to Be Human. I’ve started and stopped this review half a dozen times over the past few days since finishing it. Even now as I type these words, I genuinely don’t know where this review will end up.  First and foremost, you should know that I’m a big ol’ baby when it comes to adult horror. I read a ton of young adult horror—queer YA in particular is one of my favorite horror sub-genres—but little horror written for adults. I prefer my horror in the vein of looming dread rather than creatures bursting out of chests. The book opens with an author’s note that functions as content warnings for pregnancy-related horror as well as suicidal ideation, sexual violence, abuse, self-harm, and combinations thereof. I went into this book knowing that it would push past several of my limits. I still don’t know why I kept reading. Perhaps it was the premise of an autistic trans man falling pregnant in a dystopian near future coming from the mind of one of my favorite queer YA horror novels from last year (Compound Fracture: vicious, brutal, must-read). Perhaps it was because while the content warnings were extensive, they skipped over one specific act (likely to not spoil the novel) that didn’t become apparent until the climax. Or perhaps it was simply because I’d already dropped out of covering two other adult horror novels earlier this year that were too intense for me and I didn’t want to chicken out a third time.  Hm. I’m not doing this right. Let me back up. Crane lives in West Virginia in a not-too-distant future where abortion is mostly illegal and trans healthcare is relegated to black market HRT. After high school, his suicidal ideation hit a boiling point, and that’s when the hive found him. The hive rescued him. The hive made him one of their own. The hive gave him permission to be his true self. Or so it tells him. Or so he tells himself. He transitioned, literally and metaphorically, into his new life. But instead of shedding his old habits and haunted thoughts, they mutated over him into something as terrible on the outside as he felt on the inside.  His lover, Levi, is a vile man who is also infected by the hive. He relishes casual cruelty and lavishes Crane with as much abuse as he desires, and also maybe some he doesn’t want. His and Crane’s relationship is a complicated one, to say the least, one that whole essays could be written on. I am way too much of a sex-indifferent asexual to untangle that sadomasochistic knot, but it was fascinating to read. White takes utterly degrading moments and filters them through Crane’s perspective. We come to understand why he seeks out these encounters, what he gets out of them, and, crucially, what he doesn’t.  His sexual relationship with Levi reflects his bond with the hive. No one knows what the hive—a collection of strange, oversized worms and fly-like creatures—really is, where it came from, or what its ultimate plans are. It needs humans, though, and has pockets of cult-like followers all over the country. It found Crane and brought him into its family, making him do terrible things to others with the promise of being seen for who he is. Until he isn’t. The hive doesn’t truly see him. The hive sees him for how useful he is to it, even when that use forces him to be the person he dreads the most.  Buy the Book You Weren’t Meant to Be Human Andrew Joseph White Buy Book You Weren't Meant to Be Human Andrew Joseph White Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The book begins not with Crane’s arrival at the hive but with Jess’. Jess is in many ways what Crane used to be, and in some ways still is. With the help of the hive, she escaped the boyfriend who imprisoned her, but how she’s found herself just as imprisoned by the hive. Everything the hive promised Jess has soured, just as it does for Crane when he ends up pregnant and the hive forces him to carry it to term. The humans in the hive cult use the correct pronouns and don’t call him slurs, but if you’re the one being oppressed they aren’t that much different from run-of-the-mill authoritarian assholes. Crane is also autistic and selectively mute. White got me thinking a lot about communication, from who chose to communicate with Crane in a way that respected his need to not use his voice to who didn’t. Crane’s verbal silence was, for him, empowering in a way speech never was. It is the one thing he has total control over, a thing that is just for him and no one else, and he chooses to keep it to himself. Before I read this novel, I’d been thinking a lot lately about the memeification of neurodiversity, particularly through video platforms like Reels and TikTok. Videos of people talking about their neurodivergence in cutesy terms or like their issues are little more than a collection of idiosyncrasies. Real day-to-day challenges getting reduced down to something bite-sized that most people can relate to and that everyone else can laugh at. What we don’t often see are folks with greater challenges such as personal hygiene, communication difficulties, complex sensory needs, food limitations, and other things that aren’t quite so quirky. In other words, we talk about autism like it’s a spectrum but we often don’t treat it like one. White never shies away from exploring that spectrum in his books. He doesn’t write from a perspective of “this is bad, I hate being autistic,” but rather from “this is who I am, deal with it or gtfo.” A story like this could quickly tumble into A Handmaid’s Tale territory, but White has more insightful things to say. This isn’t just a dark dystopian about an autistic trans man going through a dysphoric experience. This is a horror novel. Body horror pops up again and again—heed that Aliens-meets-Midsommar comparison, my friends—as do graphic sexual encounters and psychological terror. The narrative style is unrelenting: violent thoughts, violent acts, violent hopes and dreams. For me, the plot was fairly predictable. Once I got used to the cadence of the horror and figured out Crane’s personality, I could tell where the story was headed. As an avid reader of romance novels, knowing where the story is going isn’t a problem for me. I care more about the journey than the specifics of the destination.  Except this isn’t a romance novel and I couldn’t guess the ending. If I had, I don’t know that I would’ve kept reading. It contains an act that is a hard line for me in fiction. I am a visual reader in that I picture what I see on the page. When I read the word “apple,” I have a very specific image of an apple that pops into my head. When I read, I “see” the scene play out in my mind’s eye. Which is why I have such a hard time with horror. I have to recreate what I read into visuals, and there are some things I don’t want to do that with. There were more than a few parts of this book where I had to skim, and the final confrontation was one of them. White’s choice to write the scene the way he did was probably the correct one for this novel and this main character, but it was too much for me personally.  Now that I’ve talked my way through writing this review (because I also hear what I read on the page in my head as if I were speaking out loud), I think I’ve come around to having a better understanding of why White—and by extension Crane—made certain narrative choices. The book wouldn’t have worked without them, the themes wouldn’t have hit as hard as they did and the power of the story itself would’ve fizzled away like a deflating balloon. This is a book that’s going to push a lot of buttons for a lot of people, in good and bad ways, but I also won’t be surprised when it ends up on a bunch of best-of lists at the end of the year.  So here’s where all this leaves me in terms of my review of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White. Did I like it? Did I understand it? Do I recommend it? I think my answers are not really, yep, and horror fans should absolutely read it. The content was not what I enjoy reading, and the experience was for me, personally, the literary equivalent of trekking up Mt Everest: arduous while it was happening yet satisfying when done, and with a lot of dead bodies passed along the way. I don’t think I can go through a reading experience like that again, but if I had to go through it at all, I’m glad it was with this book. [end-mark] You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is published by Saga Press. The post Andrew Joseph White’s <i>You Weren’t Meant to Be Human</i> Pushes a Lot of Buttons appeared first on Reactor.