You Will Feel the Sun

You Weren't Meant to Be Human · Cover design: Drusilla Adeline

Somewhere around the second trimester of this short, brutal, beautiful book I had to put it down and go stand in the actual sun for a while. Not because I was squeamish. I have a high tolerance for the wet stuff, you know that by now. I put it down because Andrew Joseph White had written the single most accurate sentence about wanting to disappear that I have encountered in a horror novel, and he'd hidden it inside a swarm of talking flies, and I needed a minute.

White had written the single most accurate sentence about wanting to disappear that I have encountered in a horror novel ...and I needed a minute.

The setup: festering hives of worms and flesh flies have rooted themselves in the dark corners of Appalachia. They find the people nobody is coming back for, the suicidal and the cornered and the cast off, and they make an offer. Loyalty and fresh corpses, in exchange for salvation. A new name. A new face. Permission to stop. Crane, our narrator, took the deal at eighteen, on the night he meant to set his own face on fire in a high school parking lot, back when he was still a girl named Sophie. The hive got to him first. It always does. It already knows you won't say no.

Three years on, Crane is on testosterone, covered ankle to neck in cheap flash tattoos, mute by choice rather than by inability, and kept by a man named Levi who treats him like a real man right up until he doesn't. Then the body Crane has spent two years renovating does the one thing he was promised it couldn't. He gets pregnant. The hive wants the child. The hive will not be talked out of it.

A lesser writer would have drowned in the constraint, would have over-narrated to compensate.

Let me tell you what White is doing here at the level of craft, because it is a feat. The whole novel runs in a close third, present tense, narrated by a voice that knows more than Crane does and tells you so on the very first page. That voice is the book's master stroke. Crane does not speak. He has an app on a borrowed tablet that turns his typing into a flat synthetic voice, and a repertoire of clicks and noises and bared teeth, and that is it. A lesser writer would have drowned in the constraint, would have over-narrated to compensate. White does the opposite. He lets the silence sit, and he lets the prose carry the interiority that Crane will not say out loud, and the result is a character whose voice is deafening precisely because he refuses to use it. By the time Stagger, the worm-riddled half-corpse who can barely form a syllable, painstakingly shapes Crane's fingers into the sign for same and then sorry, you understand that this entire book is about people trying to get a single true thing across a gap that the world has decided they don't deserve to cross.

The body horror is exact. Not gratuitous: exact. White knows the difference

The body horror is exact. Not gratuitous: exact. White knows the difference, and he keeps the camera precisely where it hurts the most, which is rarely on the gore and almost always on the small domestic indignity riding alongside it. A pregnancy test box that says women so many times it reads like groveling. A stranger at the counter who has been praying for the girl she thinks is hurting herself, who hopes she doesn't cut off her breasts, who leaves a few extra pennies in the tray as her kind deed for the night. The quickening rendered not as a miracle but as the jerk of a soft-boned limb in a body that has been keeping a secret from its owner. That is the register the whole book works in, and it is brutal in the way that only specificity is brutal.

And the structure. Five movements, named for trimesters and then for what comes after. The pregnancy is the clock, and the clock cannot be argued with, and that relentless forward pressure is the engine that makes a slim novel feel like a slow tightening of the same screw. It's Rosemary's Baby by way of a West Virginia gas station that has never once kept regular hours. The publisher pitched it as Alien meets Midsommar, which is lazy but not wrong: the chestburster dread is here, and so is the much worse horror, the smiling commune that loves you, that saved you, that will hollow you out and call it grace.

Here is where I'm supposed to give you the reservation, so I will, and then I am going to take most of it back.

The reservation is that the book occasionally does not trust its own metaphor. The hive is already saying everything the novel needs said. It is the open hand that becomes the fist, the belonging that costs you your name, the salvation indistinguishable from capture. It is, plainly, a thing about what trans and disabled and poor people are asked to swallow in exchange for being allowed to exist at all. White knows this. And every so often he reaches outside the worms to make sure you know it too, with a news bulletin about the latest Supreme Court rulings, a line of dialogue about abortion becoming a murder charge in ten states effective immediately, a senator father, a brother wanted for terrorism. In a few places the real world's furniture gets carried in and set down a little too squarely beside the allegory, and for a paragraph or two the novel tells you the thing the flies were already, more horribly, showing you.

The bleakness that some readers view as unrelenting is not a failure of modulation. It is dysphoria made structural.

Now, I take it back. Because I think that the flatness of that furniture is the point. This is a book narrated by a man who has trained himself not to feel, because feeling is the thing that nearly killed him, because the alternative to numbness was a match held to his own face. Of course the legislation lands flat. It lands flat on Crane. The news scrolls past in the same affectless register as everything else because Crane has turned the volume of his own interior all the way down in order to survive, and the prose is loyal to him even when loyalty makes it colder than a writer's instinct would want. What I read as the novel occasionally over-explaining itself is, I think, actually the novel refusing to give Crane catharsis he hasn't earned and the world won't grant. The bleakness that some readers view as unrelenting is not a failure of modulation. It is dysphoria made structural. It is what it feels like to live in a body and a country that have both decided you weren't meant to be here.

Which brings me to the ending, and I am not going to spoil the mechanics of it, only its shape, because the shape is the whole reason I am writing about this book during Pride month instead of any of the dozen kinder things I could be recommending to you.

When the hive comes for Crane's daughter, when it becomes unbearably clear that they will do to her exactly what they did to him, that she was bred to be a vessel and will spend her life as one, Crane does the only thing left that is entirely his to do. It is the most loving act in the book and it is monstrous and the two facts do not cancel. White has built three hundred pages toward a single, unforgivable mercy, and then he gives it the most tender prose in the novel, and you are not allowed to look away and you are not allowed to feel clean about it. This is the Beloved move, the oldest and most terrible one in the book of motherhood, love expressed as the refusal to hand your child to the thing that owns you. And then, on the last page, after all of it, a phone rings and a parent says a name. The chosen one. Not the dead girl's. His. And it undid me completely, because the entire bloodsoaked machine of this novel turns out to have been built to deliver one small impossible kindness: someone who knew you before says the true name, out loud, like it was always yours.

It is the cruelest thing I have read this year and it is, underneath, almost unbearably gentle about who deserves to be wanted.

That is the book. It is the cruelest thing I have read this year and it is, underneath, almost unbearably gentle about who deserves to be wanted. White's young-adult work always knew how to make tenderness and viscera share a body. His adult debut puts them in the same sentence and refuses to let either flinch.

Read it when you are strong enough. Mind the author's note, which is not decoration. And when you finish, go stand in the sun for a while. You'll have earned it, which is more than the hive ever offered anyone.

Deeper Cuts

Every review here ends in the stacks. These are related works that share a particular wound, for when you end the story and you are not ready to leave the dark yet.

If the salvation got its hooks in

The Girls, Emma Cline. The other great novel about a girl who walks toward the cult because the hunger to belong is louder than the part of her that can see the knife. Cline understands what White understands: the recruiter does not need to lie to you. He only needs to be the first one who looked.

Bunny, Mona Awad. A clique that love-bombs you, remakes you, and births soft creatures out of its own adoration. It reads as satire until you notice it is doing the exact thing the hive does, dressing erasure up as being chosen. Belonging has rarely looked this much like a trap.

If the body got its hooks in

Tell Me I'm Worthless, Alison Rumfitt. Trans horror that makes the haunted house literal and the haunting political, where the architecture itself wants you dead. Rumfitt and White are working the same nerve from opposite ends of the same country: the dysphoric body as the place the world stages its cruelty.

Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin. Relentless, furious, and tender in the same breath, about trans bodies surviving an apocalypse engineered to erase them. If Crane's loneliness got under your skin, Felker-Martin will show you what it looks like when the cast off find each other and decide to live anyway. Pair it with the sun.

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