The Host, by Stephenie Meyer

Posted by Meesh in Book Reviews, Paranormal, Romance, Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy | 5 comments

The Host, by Stephenie Meyer

reviewed by Meesh

You get two posts from me tonight. I took a nap in the middle of my last post and lost my train of thought and I’m just not happy with what I wrote. Rather than delete my other post, because I do like the idea I was trying to convey, I thought I’d just add my review of The Host to the blog and call it all good.

After I read the Twilight series, someone insisted I should read The Host. I read the description of the book and said “Oh wow, no, I’m not into alien stories”, and for a few months, I stuck to it. I got bored after awhile, because really, how many times can one read the same books without giving the brain something else to feed on? I bought The Host fully expecting to be lukewarm about it at best.

I started reading after work, as I usually do, which is really stupid of me since when I get caught up in a good story, I can’t stop reading. But since I didn’t really expect this story to capture my imagination, I figured it would be a week of one hour reading sessions, not one seven hour stretch where I couldn’t get off the couch because I needed to know what happened next.

Now, normally a book the length of The Host would take me about five hours to finish, but it took me seven. Why? I cried through the whole thing. Really. I started crying on page one, when we saw Melanie’s last panicked moments through the memories the Wanderer stole, and I didn’t stop crying until long after I had finished reading. The pain in her last minutes, knowing she was caught, not wanting to give up her body or the secrets her mind held, not wanting to endanger Jamie or Jared, it was so poignant. But the Wanderer was also in pain, pain that wasn’t really hers to bear, and it was hard to watch her suffer with that because I liked her almost immediately.

That start was just that, the start, of a long night of tears for me. I didn’t cry the kind of sick, body wracking tears I cried when I read New Moon and Edward left Bella bereft. These were quiet tears that silently ran down my face and blurred my vision, tears for things I wish I didn’t have to think about. Melanie never left her body like other hosts did, so the Wanderer got to learn the horror her species caused on the worlds they invaded and overtook. Until that time, she really believed that what they did, infiltrating a planet and inserting themselves into hosts bodies, was an act of kindness in a way.

They (the souls) believed they were doing good things, making these worlds better, and in the case of Earth, more peaceful. The souls were a perfect society, giving and taking only what was needed. They were always honest, without guile. There was no violence. They came to Earth and found us, a species prone to metaphorically, and in some cases literally, eating their own. We must have absolutely horrified them with the things we do to each other, even to others we purport to love. The Wanderer was convinced they had done us a service, bringing their calm to our chaos, but she had never seen it through the eyes of a host as sentient as humans.

Melanie showed her no mercy, either. She didn’t play nice, letting the Wanderer know that she was a killer, that her entire species was nothing more than parasites who had taken things they had no right to take. And as the realization of that sunk in for the Wanderer, I cried more and more. It wasn’t only the Wanderers pain I felt, though. I felt a kind of horror as I recognized the parallels between our behavior and that of the souls.

The souls treated humans very much the way humans treat everything. Anything different from us can’t possibly be as good as we are. In general, we see differences as better and worse, not as just different. And we fear different and try to destroy it. We exploit everything we come across, even (or perhaps especially) other humans. I could list dozens of examples of our callousness toward things that are different from us, things like slavery, the decimation of the native peoples in the Americas. Not to jump on my soapbox, or perhaps exactly to jump on my soapbox, but Europeans came to this country and saw not people, but creatures. Then later settlers came and saw a chance to “better” the lives of the people there, even if it meant killing them. They stole cultures, homogenizing an entire race of people, and thought nothing of it. And this country is not the only place it has happened in the history of humanity, nor is this behavior history – it goes on and on.

So the horror that the Wanderer felt, I also felt, because I know it’s happening on Earth somewhere right now. Humans are finding a population of whales tucked away in a hidden place and we’re fishing them to extinction. There are turf wars happening where people are hiding in the dark waiting for their enemies to swoop in unseen and take their lives, and the way we take lives isn’t nearly as painless and peaceful as the way the souls did. Somewhere people are enslaving, killing, exploiting, ruining other tribes, nations, religious groups, because they fear differences or because they want something and don’t want to pay for it.

At the end of the story, I closed the book and the tears continued to pour down. I’ve read the book three times more since then, always with the same tears, and I wonder if Stephenie Meyer meant the story to hit readers at the level it hit me. When I read fan talk about the book, a lot of women talk about Ian or Jared and how they want an Ian of their own, blah, blah, blah. The love story portion of the book was lost on me. I didn’t see a love story. I saw a story of the state of humanity and cried at the irony, that humans are outraged at being treated with disregard but still not recognizing that we treat everything with that same disregard.

And then I realized that maybe I don’t drink enough, that maybe The Host was really supposed to be a sweet love story, but I didn’t see that at all. And it still makes my heart ache. Writing about it isn’t any less painful for me than reading it was. If you haven’t read The Host yet, let me apologize for planting these thoughts, because it would probably be a lot more pleasant to just get the overtones of the story and not see what I saw. If you have read it, I hope you will think about what I wrote and see if you agree or not and if you don’t, please, I’d be really happy to be proven wrong because damn, I hate seeing humanity in reading material. I wonder if Stephenie Meyer knew what she was writing.