I three-starred this. But keep reading.

Every so often, when you are in the habit of reviewing things, you encounter something that sort of breaks your review system. Most of the books I read get rated four or five stars, because I have been reading books for my entire life and I have gotten pretty good at picking books that I am going to like. Five stars is a book I really enjoyed and will recommend to people. Four stars is a book that I enjoyed but had some flaws or for whatever reason I feel less likely to talk about. Three stars is a book that was just kind of there; two stars, a lot of the time, was a DNF, and one star was a book I actively loathed and wish to punish.

You tell me: how do I star-rate a book that I personally really did not enjoy reading, but nonetheless recognize as a well-written book that may very well be appealing to other people? Because I have no damn idea, really. You Weren’t Meant to be Human is body horror. It’s about a trans man who gets pregnant. That’s already a body horror situation well before we get to the variety of mental issues that the protagonist, Crane, has. And to avoid being misunderstood, by “mental issues,” I do not mean the fact that Crane is autistic and very nearly nonverbal. No, I’m talking about the rape fantasies (as in fantasizing about being raped) and the degrading sex and the self-mutilation. If you’ve ever needed to read trigger warnings, go nowhere near this book. There are warnings at the beginning of the book, and they are extensive.

It floated through my head at one point that this is the book that TJ Klune would write if TJ Klune was KM Szpara, but I’m not convinced that makes any sense.

In addition to … all that, see those worms on the cover? Crane is part of (kidnapped and forcibly inducted into? Maybe.) a cult that worships, or at least … cares for? this possibly-alien hive mind intelligence that exists in our world mostly as a horrifying conglomeration of bugs and flies and worms and other grotesqueries. Crane knows who the (other) father of his baby is, but at the same time he spends most of the book convinced that he’s about to give birth to a giant slug or perhaps just a giant knot of maggots. The cult does a lot of murdering so that the hive has stuff to eat, and for most of the book Crane is protected/guarded/imprisoned by what is effectively a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the people they’ve fed to the thing. The Frankenstein is named Stagger. Crane occasionally fantasizes about fucking it and there’s at least one sequence where he at least comes close. I’m not going to go back and reread to clarify my memory here.

Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen (which, now that I think about it, did get a bit of foreshadowing) and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.

I’m not sure this book is supposed to be “enjoyed,” is the thing, which is why I’m not comfortable with panning it and why I more or less devoured the fucking thing in one sitting rather than putting it in the freezer and forgetting I ever saw it. A lot of the reviews I’m seeing for it are positively rapturous and the thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with them. I just …

*shiver*

Yeah. No more, thank you. That’s enough of that. But if you feel like you might be into this? I’m not mad about it.