#REVIEW: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White

On September 28, 2025September 29, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

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.

In which I’m not here

On June 2, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I just got home from a day trip to the northern suburbs of Chicago for my niece’s first birthday party; as my brother is not comfortable with me posting pictures of his children to my blog (which I understand completely, for the record) please allow as a substitute this most excellent picture of his dog Jack that my son took. Jack, you will not be surprised to learn, is a Good Boy.

Take bets in comments on whether I’ll make it through a single day of my big summer plan before it falls apart.

In which I uncle

On June 6, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

Intellectually, I knew that my own son was quite large when he was born, and that my nephew, a day short of six weeks old in this picture, was an average-sized infant, but … man. Lil’ dude is teeny.

Between having to share a queen bed with my wife last night when both of us are used to a king, the lack of a fan in the room, and the barely-functioning air conditioner– I do not have anything nice to say about the hotel we stayed at– I am crabby and tired at the moment, and am very likely to go to bed absurdly early tonight. Tomorrow, I start formally Planning and Preparing. We’ll see how much I get done.

In which I give up

On April 27, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment

My nephew is here, having arrived into the world at around 5:15 yesterday evening; he is of normal size and proportion and in possession of all of the various bits he is supposed to be in possession of. Mom and Dad are also fine, if perhaps slightly dazed. They live much closer to her family than to ours; it’s going to be a couple of weeks before we’re able to go up there and meet him, and I spent a good chunk of last night fighting off a wave of surprisingly intense jealousy that her people were getting to see the new arrival so much earlier than us until I talked to my brother on the phone and he pointed out that, because of Covid, they weren’t allowed any visitors at the hospital, and so nobody other than my brother and sister-in-law are going to get to interact with him until they go home, which should be tomorrow.

My first thought when I saw him was that he got his nose from our side of the family, and then I looked more carefully at my brother’s nose and decided that I didn’t have any idea what the hell I was talking about. I’ve always halfway suspected people just pick a facial feature and a relative when they say things like that, and it entertained me how fast the reaction was on my part and how utterly nonsensical it was when I thought about it. He has the same baby nose as every baby.

Today was exhausting. It’s the first really warm day of the year around here, topping off at around 82 degrees, and my building does not do ventilation all that well; the windows open but it does a lot less good than you might think, and I spent basically the whole damn day sweating. On top of that, the math portion of the ILEARN started today, and my group was quite clearly Over It by the end of the test, despite the fact that every time I walked around and read questions over people’s shoulders it was stuff we had covered recently. Like, this quarter, if not actually in the three weeks I’ve been back.

Insert every rant I’ve ever ranted about how the fuck do you not remember this and what are you people doing that you can know how to do something on Tuesday and act like you’ve never seen it before on Wednesday. By the time we got to eighth hour I was so sweaty and crabby and hot that I actually gave them the period off, because however I was explaining my shit to them today it wasn’t sinking in; my kids were, no shit, having trouble with questions like is this line going up or down all day, and I just cannot right now, at all.

Then in between the bell ringing at the end of the day and getting out of the building I had to deal with two entirely different situations in which a student was bawling and inconsolable and figure out what the hell was wrong and what I could do to fix it, one of which involved a quick parent phone call because the kid was convinced his parents wouldn’t believe him about what had just happened.

I’m in my sleep shorts and a tank top right now, and I don’t wear tank tops. That’s how Goddamned tired I am. Thank God I don’t have any kids tomorrow; I need to get my equilibrium back.

Pictured: not my nephew

On April 26, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Or maybe it is. How would you know? There’s no way to know, they all look alike.

I am, in fact, rather impatiently awaiting the birth of my first nephew and first nibling; he is not here yet, but from what I hear he and his mother have been working on it since about 7:30 this morning. While I’m sure I’m not remotely as excited as my brother and my sister-in-law, I have thought of little else all day. There hasn’t been an update in a little while (and I made it clear to each and every one of my classes that I would be checking my phone constantly and basically dared them to have anything to say about it) so hopefully that means everybody got busy real quick. 🙂

The new parents aren’t wild about pictures of lil’ dude being spread all over the internet so I probably won’t post any pictures of him once he’s here, but I might post pictures of somebody else’s kid so y’all can pretend.

Who else is excited about something right now?

In which I am so very screwed

On September 13, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting6 Comments

10689603_10152725579744066_3989070658350097557_n I will note that we have, only just tonight, finally converted my son’s crib to a toddler bed. Developmentally speaking, we probably ought to have gotten to this a bit ago, but he never really got to the point where he was trying to crawl/climb out of his crib so it didn’t make itself a very high priority.

This means, of course, that now, once we put him to bed at night, he can get out.

There are not that many ways in which I look back at my childhood and recognize that I tormented my parents. I’m fully aware that I was a pain in the ass, mind you, as all kids are, but there aren’t many specific ways that I can name. One of them, though, where I’m not sure how my parents got through my early years without killing me, was my penchant to get out of bed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to go to ask my parents– well, anything. Requests. Demands. Complaints. Existential horror. Whatever.

I have mostly not wanted to turn the boy’s crib into a bed because I can feel the evil claws of Karma scratching at the back of my neck. The boy, as much as he might not want to admit it, is me writ small in a plethora of ways, and I suspect that we’re about to find one of them. Tonight, it begins. There will never be privacy again.

Sigh.

Creepy children’s programming review: Color Crew

On February 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Reviews14 Comments

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So this “Color Crew” program is the new shizz around here for some reason. TV for little kids is always deeply weird on one axis or another; this may be the weirdest program he’s ever wanted to watch, with the possible exception of “WordWorld,” which isn’t allowed into my house any longer.

Color Crew is the story of ten crayons. The ten crayons are basically identical except for Purple, who is high as hell, and Green, who is… special. The intro song sets up the basic premise of the program:

See, the whole thing is about competing for the hat, which has magical powers and allows the Color of the Day the power of speech. The crayon’s only allowed to say its name, though, so it’s not actually that great as a superpower. The crayons all hop around and compete for the honor of wearing the Hat, which always goes to the fourth crayon in line, a fact that they seem not quite bright enough to have figured out yet. Then that crayon and the crayon to its left get to go color a picture.

Coloring a picture is very exciting! The pictures exist in a weird world without perspective, though, so it’s entirely possible that the piggy bank on the bed is 2/3 the size of the entire bed, or the two cherries on a plate are going to be the same size as the entire piece of cake on the plate next to it:

Note the relative sizes of, say, the two oranges, the frying pan, and the carton of milk. Which is, inexplicably, on a plate. Somewhere underneath them will be some built-in shelves each holding a single carrot.

Anyway, as you can see, the Color of the Day gets to color some of the things in the picture! This is very happymaking for everyone involved, and the crayons get rather indecently excited about it. Like, there are crayon boners going on, I swear. Sooner or later, though, the color of the day will stop shrieking his name over and over again and get a liiiitle bit too excited and color something the wrong color. Objects in Color Crew world, you see, can only be one color, ever, and the other colors will tolerate no bending of this rule. The mixture of horror and sadness on the face of the other crayon when something gets mis-colored cannot be expressed properly in language and must be seen to be believed.

And then the sinister purpose of the second crayon becomes apparent. He’s the enforcer. He’s there to make sure the rules get followed. He’s there to summon the Angry Eraser:

The Angry Eraser is a terrifying mixture of a shop teacher from a 1970’s teen movie and Adolf Hitler. He exists to destroy art and color and is perfectly happy with his role as Pure Evil. He glares hatefully at the miscreant crayon, destroys their horrible mistake, and then grins like a fucking pedophile maniac and skids back off screen. At which point the Color Overseer recolors the deviant portion of the page and everyone gets back to work. Sooner or later all of the crayons zoom in, at which the picture unaccountably becomes colored with markers instead of crayons:

The whole thing is weird and creepy, so naturally my kid loves it. How long until he can watch Walking Dead with the wife and I?

What’s a “day off?”

On August 25, 2013August 25, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

My son turned two on Friday. I was thinking about using today to muse about fatherhood a little bit, but instead I’m all OH MY GOD THERE ARE ONE MILLION FAMILY MEMBERS COMING OVER IN FIVE HOURS FOR A PARTY FOR A TWO YEAR OLD BLUE ICING EVERYWHERE COOKING FOR A HUNDRED ALL I KNOW HOW TO MAKE IS DIP JESUS WHERE DID THE VACUUM GO HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE WE CLEANED THIS HEY I THOUGHT WE POTTY TRAINED THE DOGS WHY THE HELL IS THERE SNOT THERE WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TOILET WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST STEP ON WHERE IS THE OTHER GRAPEFRUIT WHY ARE WE OUT OF PROPANE.