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

 

I heard about this in my wanderings online, and there seemed to be some hype about it. While the prose is functionally and structurally sound, the novel itself is a bit of hot and noisy mess: There's a mess of pointless body horror wrapped around what could have been an interesting horror story about identity and the loss thereof--the main sure as heck isn't really the person he believes himself to be, and probably hasn't ever really been, between being trans and an autist and (judging by the events of the novel) deeply kinked; most of that ends up reading as self-loathing and a certain kind of weakness--he's certainly much more a character things happen to than he one who does things. And while the novel does have things to say, they aren't so much "subtext" as they are flashing neon signs; missing them would almost be an act of will. The "shock" of the ending is visible tens of pages out or more, and I spend most of the back third or so of the novel just kinda waiting for things to resolve. For a novel that wants to throw so much body horror at the reader, it struck me as kinda bland and tepid, but I've read a lot of horror and my mom was an OB nurse, I knew the basic facts of pregnancy and childbirth before I was in kindergarten, they've never grossed me out or scared me; I'm probably very much not the person White was aiming to shock with this novel. Not horrible, which given the genre is maybe not the ringing endorsement it might be.