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Literature / The Host (2008)
aka: The Host

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If you're looking for the Korean horror film, see The Host (2006).

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The Host is a 2008 Science Fiction novel by Twilight creator Stephenie Meyer, and was both her first sci-fi work and her first adult novel.

It takes place After the End, where a successful infiltration-style Alien Invasion means the Puppeteer Parasites have made the world a more pleasant and peaceful place where they can just sit back and enjoy life... aside, of course, from that pesky handful of "wild" humans, who caught on sooner and have still managed to avoid capture. Enter "Wanderer", a "Soul" (alien brain parasite) who's been unusually restless, going from one world to the next... and enter Melanie Stryder, one of the few remaining wild humans, who's just been captured sneaking around Chicago and is now Wanderer's host. However, it turns out that knowing your body's going to be taken over by a Soul allows one to fight back, and Melanie fiercely resists giving up intel or her mind in an effort to protect both the man she loves and her younger brother from sharing the same fate.

This means trouble for Wanderer of course, since not only are human senses and emotions more intense than any other body she's ever experienced, so too are human memories more ridiculously vivid - and Wanderer finds herself inevitably growing to love Melanie's man Jared and brother Jamie, even though she's never met either. Eventually she even grows to consider Melanie herself a friend, despite originally wanting her to disappear. This combination leads her to risk absolutely everything to find Jared and Jamie... which gets more than a little awkward when she actually does succeed in finding them, only to be kept as a prisoner since, duh, she's one of Them now. Just to let you know exactly where all this is kind of headed towards, the novel's premise is often somewhat accurately summed up as being "a love triangle with two bodies"; "somewhat", because by the end of the book it's actually more like a love quadrangle with three bodies.

It turns out to be an odd entry into the SF genre, though, because the aliens are actually "altruistic" and "kind" by nature, but unfortunately suffer from a seriously inverted case of What Measure Is a Non-Human? They're clever when it comes to technology and have "peacefully" conquered countless worlds and many of them have lived for literally thousands of years in different hosts ... but they have never considered that their hosts might deserve to have free will too. Which makes things more than a little uncomfortable once Wanderer realizes that she actually considers humans to be likable in their own right, and becomes torn between being loyal to her own species and betraying them for the sake of largely unrequited inter-species love.

The film version of The Host was released on March 29, 2013 and was written and directed by Andrew Niccol.


This book provides examples of:

  • Adaptation Dye-Job:
    • In the book, Melanie is described as having dark brown hair, hazel eyes and tanned skin. As portrayed by Saoirse Ronan, Melanie is fair-skinned with blue eyes and her hair is a lighter shade of brown.
    • Ian and Kyle have black hair in the book. In the film, they're both blonde.
    • Wanda's replacement body is brunette instead of blonde.
    • Burns was a redhead in the book, but has brown hair in the movie.
  • Adapted Out: Considering how thick the book is, there was obviously a considerable amount of book content left out of the film version.
    • Kyle disappears from the film after his failed attempt to kill Wanderer, but in the book, he remains a significant character and even gets a redemption arc where he rescues his Soul-infested girlfriend only to discover that her original human self did not survive the infestation process like Melanie did. But after befriending the Soul that is now inhabiting her body, he realizes that not all of the Souls are bad and pulls a Heel–Face Turn that leads to him even becoming one of Wanderer's most trusted human allies by the end of the book.
    • In the book, the human resistance eventually gains a second Soul defector besides Wanderer with Sunny. She is completely absent from the film because her only plot importance is to play a role in Kyle's aforementioned redemption arc that is also missing from the film version (she is the Soul inhabiting the body of Kyle's girlfriend).
    • Several of the cave dwellers from the book don't show up in the movie, most notably Melanie's cousin Sharon.
    • The book has Wanderer giving detailed descriptions of some of the other alien species that the Souls have conquered (at least the ones from planets that she had personally spent time on before arriving on Earth). The film mentions that the Souls have conquered other planets besides Earth and establishes that Wanderer has spent time on several of them, but never gives any details about the alien species on those worlds.
  • Aerith and Bob: The Souls, some of whom retain names they had in previous lives on other worlds (Fords Deep Waters, Sunlight Passing Through the Ice), and some of whom decide to take the names of their human hosts.
  • Age-Gap Romance:
    • Jared and Melanie have nine years between them; they first met and began a relationship when Melanie was 17 and Jared was 26. By the present day, Melanie is 21 and Jared is 30. It's mentioned that they waited until Melanie was eighteen before having sex.
    • Wanderer and Ian are a complicated case. Ian is in his mid-twenties and Wanderer is inhabiting 21 year old Melanie's body when they meet, although in human years Wanderer is actually around a 1000 years old. In the end, Wanderer gets put into a another, permanent host body, who is around 17 years old, nearly a decade younger than Ian, though she still has all of Wanderer's life experience.
  • Aggressive Categorism: Sharon and her mom keep clinging to the hatred and suspicion most people felt against Wanderer even long after the suspicions have been proven wrong and the hatred abandoned by almost everyone else. Towards the end, their failed attempt to keep Wanderer alienated from the community only make them alienate themselves from this same community. However, it should be noted that we only get to see their pettiness from Wanderer's far-from-impartial perspective.
  • Aliens Speaking English: But only the ones who've got human hosts, and only because their host would have known it first. (Assuming that the host did speak English, of course. The story's set in America, though, so for our purposes it's a moot point).
  • And I Must Scream: Happens to a few Soul-possessed humans, although generally it seems that the human's mind is destroyed when the Soul takes over.
  • The Alcoholic: Doc has shades of this, due to being a woefully under-equipped medical expert in what's essentially a refugee camp. His repeated failures to surgically extract Souls from their hosts, inevitably killing both in the process, don't help either.
  • Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: The Souls completely neglect to realize that there might be something about humanity (or, hell, any species that isn't their own) worth saving, at least at first. The human version of the trope also makes a bit of an appearance, but given that the Souls not only stole our planet, but also our entire way of life, virtually all of our infrastructure, and the bodies of many loved ones, and are still somewhat set on capturing the rest of us and making us hosts as well... you can kind of see the logic in not particularly liking them much, no matter how "altruistic" and "nice" they may otherwise be.
  • Author Avatar: Melanie Stryder. She just spoonerized her own name.
  • Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Brothers Ian and Kyle spend most of the story against one another, especially where it relates to Wanda, and it gets to the point where Ian is briefly the main person trying to kick Kyle out of the caves. Just when you think they are going to fall into Cain and Abel territory, they get moments that reveal their bond and love for each other.
    • Sharon and Doc remain estranged for a lot of the story over their respective views towards Wanda, but in the end, she does wordlessly reconcile with him by dragging her mattress back next to his after Melanie and Wanda are separated (and after Doc gets a female assistant Sharon may have realized could be competition if they didn't fix things).
  • Back-Alley Doctor: Doc, like every other person who's still human, lives in a cave and drinks too much, but he's the only doctor who isn't a body-snatching alien. Given his efforts to remove Souls from their human hosts (which are unsuccessful until Wanda helps him, with those failures and the deaths they cause contributing to his drinking), he also embodies aspects of a Sole Surviving Scientist.
  • Bad Liar: Wanderer, mostly because Souls (with the exception of Seekers and members of the first wave) never needed to lie.
  • Benevolent Alien Invasion: The "Souls" see themselves this way, at least.
  • Better to Die than Be Killed: Melanie and a few other humans attempt suicide to prevent being captured and taken over.
    • In the film, Melanie's father shot himself in the head for this reason when the Seekers showed up at their house. Later, two of the human resistance's red shirts drive their truck into a wall after the Souls have them cornered.
      • This is actually brought up by Wanderer as something that her race finds profoundly frightening, since they see themselves as helpful and altruistic.
    • An example of this happening on another planet is mentioned by Wanderer near the beginning - an "entire forest" of "See Weeds" starving themselves of sunlight and dying before the Souls could use them as hosts, as they couldn't physically run (what with being sentient plants).
  • Big Brother Mentor: Jared to Jamie.
  • Bizarre Alien Biology: Leaving aside the fact that Souls have no eyes (or mouths?), have blood and other tissue that's silvery in color, and are effectively a very squishy, gracefully flowing centipede with brain-controlling tentacles, there's also their reproductive method, which involves the queens essentially committing suicide by splitting apart into thousands upon thousands of tiny little babies.
    • Not to mention the other species the Souls have captured. These include gelatinous floating creatures, aliens with double-sided hands and four hearts, and multiple species of sentient plants.
  • Black Dude Dies First: Subverted. The one black man present in the human colony does not die first. He does, however, die the only violent death onscreen, when the Seeker shoots him.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: It's Utopia Justifies the Means and Humans Are the Real Monsters vs. Aliens Are Bastards and Humans Are Special. Both sides are shown to have their good and bad points, and the aliens and the humans genuinely don't know the other side's motivations and think they are in the right.
  • Body Surf: Wanda ends up doing this when her friends swap her into another vacated body.
  • Broken Aesop: Free will is more important than a utopia, and living parasitically in a host body is immoral. Which is why we'll move Wanderer against her express wishes into a different host body, ruining another alien's happy life in the process.
  • Cain and Abel: Kyle and Ian just skirt being this. Jeb and Maggie also come close, in a rare brother-sister variation of the trope.
  • Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": A Justified Trope in this case. The Souls only know the native language of their host, so they use the closest Earth analogue to describe other alien races that they've conquered. Notable examples include the Bears (four-arms with double-sided hands, along with four hearts), the Dragons (gelatinous floating blobs), and the Dolphins (three sexes, each with either three, five, or seven legs).
  • Chickification: Wanderer is a strong, intelligent Soul who has been on more worlds than most and is held in high regard among the Souls. She once defeated a Claw Beast on the planet of the Bears, transplanted a friend into it on the spot, and rode it into the city. At the end of the book, she's implanted in the body of a petite young blonde girl and can't even carry her own sleeping mat without the help of her man.
    • Melanie gets it as well. She starts out as a strong survivor who opted to jump down an elevator shaft to save herself from being assimilated. Any time her boyfriend appears onscreen though, or comes to her mind, she makes some pretty stupid decisions, including letting Wanderer know where her colony of "wild" humans are hiding (keep in mind that Wanderer's job is to find and assimilate them as well).
  • Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends: Meyer has a tendency to do this pretty much every single time she writes fiction, but at least here it's not quite to the level of being Strangled by the Red String.
  • Cool Big Sis: Melanie and, by extension, Wanda for Jamie. They are a bit overprotective, but given the environment, it's understandable.
  • Crazy-Prepared: Melanie's relatives, but especially Jeb — he completely overhauls a cave system to make it inhabitable, solely because he thought he'd need an Elaborate Underground Base someday.
  • Death by Childbirth: The Soul's reproduction method is a suicidal process for the Mother.
  • Dogged Nice Guy: Ian.
  • Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: A borderline case occurs towards the end when Kyle's girlfriend turns out to be brain-dead, leading the humans to place the Soul back inside of her.
  • Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi: Downplayed. Wanda, while possessing Melanie’s body, makes out with Ian while Melanie is screaming, “No! Stop!” in her head. If they’d had sex, they both would’ve been effectively raping Melanie.
  • Dramatically Missing the Point: On one world the Souls have already conquered, the natives caught wind of their invasion early on and an entire continent's worth of its population committed mass suicide rather than be taken and used as puppets by the Souls. The Souls, of course, don't even stop to think that it might be their fault, blaming the people themselves for being too unenlightened to see how much better being mind controlled would be for them.
  • Easily Forgiven: Wanda is unreasonably forgiving towards Ian and a random guy, both of whom tried to kill her. The former actually becomes her boyfriend after they spend time together and Melanie is understandably upset when this happens.
  • Elaborate Underground Base: The free humans live in a series of caves, complete with crops and a system of mirrors to provide sunlight when needed (and switch to stealth when Souls are lurking nearby).
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Seeker.
    • Also, Doc. Wanda actually asks him why that is, and it turns out he finds his real name embarrassing. It's Eustace.
  • Everything Sounds Sexier in French: When a Soul gets a new host, they automatically gain all of that host's communicative abilities, which leads Wanderer to often mention translated idioms from previous alien cultures that she's lived in... which leads to a running gag with her noting that "it sounds better in Bear".
  • Extreme Doormat: The normal way for Souls to behave towards each other, much to the annoyance of the human characters when watching it on television or interacting with Wanderer. On top of Wanderer's natural disposition, add that she is constantly terrified and uses it as a survival strategy to avoid antagonizing her (understandably) hostile captors. She gets better about it as she feels less threatened and learns more of human culture. At the end, it is revealed that Wanderer was actually far LESS doormatty than the average Soul all along. The new character Sunny is portrayed as not only being far worse than Wanderer in this regard, but also as being the normal and average for her species. It becomes rather obvious that if Souls and Humans are ever going to be able to coexist on Earth, it will take not only Souls protecting the Humans from other Souls, but also Humans protecting the Souls from other Humans.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • It never occurs to the Souls (including Wanderer, at first) that maybe they shouldn't be taking over the minds of every species they run across and essentially wiping them out. One species commits mass suicide to escape them; rather than rethink their system the Souls cheerily continue infesting the ones who didn't escape in time, pausing only briefly to regret the waste of host bodies. They also tend to babble about humans being violent, while at the same time making an organized effort to "discard" all "wild" humans.
      • Even after Wanda comes to the conclusion that Humans Are Special and shouldn't be hosts, she doesn't extend the same consideration to the other species that the Souls have conquered. For that matter neither do the humans, who are more than happy to ship disembodied Souls off to other worlds to inhabit hosts there.
    • The Seeker, at at least in the film, makes a point to mention that Earth is the only planet that they have done this on where the inhabitants were not symbiotic with the Souls.
  • Faster-Than-Light Travel: Also somewhat implied (at least if we give Meyer the benefit of the doubt). No way are any habitable, carbon-based-life-supporting planets within 5 years' travel of Earth without it, even if they are Generation Ships.
    • It's outright stated that, even with faster than light travel, the closest planetary system takes at least a decade to reach (the furthest ones require centuries). On this point at least, Meyer has done her homework.
    • It's also mentioned that there are a race called "Spiders" who, despite having a very short lifespan are all extreme Gadgeteer Geniuses, so FTL was one of the first things they made once taken over.
  • The Film of the Book
  • Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Kyle and Ian. Maggie and Jeb are a subversion in that Maggie comes across as rather level-headed while Jeb comes across as somewhat crazy. However, Maggie is the foolish one as she lets pride and stubbornness rule out basic logic, while Jeb is the responsible one who views things from all angles and is quick on his feet.
  • Forced Kiss: Jared does this to Melanie, during their first meeting.
  • Fourth-Date Marriage: Doesn't really happen, but it's kind of the same deal with Melanie and Jared.
  • Gambit Roulette: Jared initially believes everything Wanderer does is proof that she's secretly a Seeker trying to infiltrate the group. This starts to annoy the others since he keeps it up way too long, to the point where even Jared starts to realize how ridiculous he's being.
  • Genetic Memory: The Souls have a form of this, though given the way they reproduce, it kinda makes a vague sort of sense.
  • Going Native: Wanderer. Later also other Souls, such as Sunny.
  • Good Versus Good: The conflict between Soul society and the free humans gradually develops into this, as Wanderer teaches the humans how to gain the moral high ground by getting rid of Souls without harming them, thus denying Souls their excuse to identify themselves as the peaceful side of the conflict.
  • Guilt Complex: Wanderer feels that everything that goes wrong is her fault. Sometimes she's right to feel that way, but most of the time it's the complex.
  • Half Way Plot Switch: Happens twice. It starts out being about an alien adjusting to life as a bodysnatcher, then devotes the entire second act, and much of the third, to developing platonic and romantic relationships with the rebels, before focusing on saving the humans near the end.
  • Happiness in Slavery: Sunny really enjoys being kidnapped. Well, except for when people argue over her or insist that they should set her free or at least let her out of the cave.
  • Heel–Face Turn: Wanderer's joining the side of the humans. She is not alone in this; other Souls like Sunny and Burns do the same.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Melanie attempts suicide in order to prevent the hosts from using her memories. Wanderer attempts suicide so no other human has to be subsumed to give her a life, but the others intervene at the last second.
  • Heroic BSoD: Wanderer has one when she discovers Doc is attempting to remove Souls from humans, killing both in the process. She hides herself away for two days and doesn't talk to anyone.
  • He Who Fights Monsters: The Seeker is this, with the humans being the monsters.
  • Honor Before Reason: Or rather Empathy Before Reason. In either case, this is Melanie's view on Wanderer trying to protect the life of a guy who repeatedly tried to kill her.
    • She also tries to trade her life to save the life of the Seeker, who has hounded her for months and killed one of her friends.
  • Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Kyle and Jodi/Sunny. This also is the fate of Ian and Wanda in Pet's body.
  • Humanity Is Infectious: Souls develop genuine feelings for their human host's loved ones through memory, which has led to Wanderer and other Souls developing an appreciation for humanity.
    • At one point, Wanda notices one couple in human bodies who love their human son enough that they have been granted permission to raise him as his own person.
  • Humans Are Special: According to Wanderer, who has experienced life as most of the sentient races of the known universe, humans have more individual variation and a deeper range of emotions than any of the other species. However, this assertion might be unfair to those other races, since they were never truly given a fair chance to express themselves. And Wanderer is emotionally biased in favor of humans anyway. In any case, humans are objectively special in the sense that they are the first species to resist possession.
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters: Played perfectly straight and completely deconstructed. On an individual level, Humans are far more violent, hostile, hateful and generally dangerous than the naturally meek and friendly Souls. On the societal level, humans have in the past committed genocide against their own species and harmed the environment of their own home world. Souls would never do such a thing, and can't imagine themselves doing such a thing - thus refusing to realize the truth about what they have become. They are oppressive genocidal tyrants now, and the few of them who start to realize it are having a very hard time living with themselves.
    • On a meta level, this is where The Host connects to Twilight. Both stories are about love between a creature who is monstrous but kind and his comparatively meek and fragile little lover, and about his struggle to contain himself and his people so she doesn't get hurt. In both cases, it has nothing to do with gender, it's all about species. However, it just so happens that the male happens to be of the monstrous species (vampire in Twilight, human in The Host) while the female just happens to be of the meeker species (human in Twilight, Soul in The Host).
  • Human Popsicle: Or, rather, Alien Popsicle. The Souls go into suspended animation when traveling between worlds, since the trip can take up to a century.
  • Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Wanderer. Notably, she's the rounded version of this trope — she does feel dark temptations, on more than one occasion.
  • Indestructible Edible: Twinkies are found in an abandoned house.
  • Inspector Javert: The Seeker, who is convinced that Wanderer has been compromised by her host and that it's only a matter of time before she loses control entirely. She's not correct, but she's not terribly far off, either. Part of her zeal stems from dealing with a similar situation from her own unquiet host.
  • Interspecies Romance: Does not always work out, though.
  • In-Series Nickname: Some Souls have these since their names tend to be mouthfuls. We get Wanda for Wanderer, Sunny for Sunlight Passing Through the Ice, Pet for Petals Open to the Moon, Fords for Fords Deeps Waters and Burns for Burns Living Flowers.
  • It Has Been an Honor: Doc says a variant of this to Wanderer, right before her (attempted) Heroic Sacrifice.
  • I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Wanderer gives up on retaining Melanie as a host for Melanie's sake, effectively trying to commit suicide because she doesn't even want to take over another host (she now sees it as cruel and unfair to the host)... but also largely to give Melanie back to Jared and vice versa, making it a sort of double I Want My Beloved to Be Happy.
  • Jailbait Wait: Jared refused to sleep with Melanie until she turned eighteen. Wanderer took note of this, and lies about her new host body's age so that Ian wouldn't have the same scruple.
  • Jerkass: The Seeker, again. At least in part because her host is just as bad.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Kyle, though it takes a while for the "heart of gold" part to show up.
  • Long-Lived: The Souls, which are essentially biologically immortal barring unforeseen circumstances. Other alien species are also implied to be this, as the Souls claim that humans have some of the shortest life cycles in the Universe.
  • Love Redeems: The main reason Souls mistreat humans and humans mistreat Souls is that they fail to form emotional bonds with each other across the species line. As the cause melts away, so does the effect.
  • Love Triangle: In two bodies! The triangle being Melanie/Jared/Wanderer.
    • Love Dodecahedron: In three bodies! Ian loves Wanderer who falls for him in return, but Mel is so steadfast in her love for Jared that the body causes Wanda not to respond to Ian and forces her to have feelings for Jared. Jared loves Melanie but there are hints that he is starting to fall for Wanderer as well.
  • May Fly December Romance: Wanderer and Ian.
  • Mauve Shirt: Wes
  • Meaningful Echo: "It's a strange world." "The strangest."
  • Meaningful Name: Wanderer. Lucina's son, Freedom.
    • Generally all the names of the Souls are this, since they take them from species they've been before, things they've done, or personality traits.
  • Men Are the Expendable Gender: This is very subtle, but present still. Almost all of those who die are male, and they get killed off before we really get a chance to know them much.
  • Men of Sherwood: Several of the thirty-five humans in Jeb's compound venture aboveground to spy on the alien race that conquered Earth and scavenge supplies or act as guards at the cavern's entrance. Several of them are pretty minor characters and/or behave hostilely to the main character, but only one of them dies in the book and only two die in the movie (under different circumstances).
  • Mercy Kill: An old man in the human community is painfully dying of bone cancer. Jared steals enough painkillers for Doc to give him an overdose.
  • Mighty Whitey: Race- and species-inverted with Wanderer in Mel's body. Also gender-inverted, since the traditional Mighty Whitey is male.
  • Mind-Control Eyes: A Soul-possessed human's eyes develop a silvery eye shine (given that the Souls' tissue and blood is silvery in color, this may or may not make a slight bit of sense). This is somewhat portrayed on the book's cover, though, as only part of the pupil appears silver, instead of the "all of it" kind of portion you'd get from eye shine. This is likely to show that Melanie is partially in control.
  • The Mind Is A Play Thing Of The Body: The Souls are strongly affected by natural instincts and sometimes memories of their hosts. If a human host loved someone before the transformation and this feeling was mutual, it's very likely their Souls will become a couple. It happens even if Souls haven't met each other before.
  • Moe: Invoked with the choice of Wanda's final host, who is so petite and pretty that other people will naturally want to protect her and not suspect her of anything.
  • Moral Myopia: To the Souls, having the host gain control of them and thus erase their identity is considered a Fate Worse than Death. The Souls doing this to their hosts is, of course, nothing of the sort.
  • Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: Souls that don't take their human host's name tend to have these, such as 'Sunlight Passing Through the Ice', 'Glass Spires', and 'Rides the Beast'.
  • Noble Savage: How Wanderer see the free humans... well, most of the time, anyway. The way Sunny reacts to being kidnapped into their community, she probably feel the same way.
  • Only You Can Repopulate My Race: This was what Melanie and Jared thought while they were together. It turns out that there are other non-possessed humans in the secret camp. It makes one wonder if they stayed together because they were so used to being alone or if they truly were in love.
  • Parasitic Immortality: The story features parasitic aliens called "Souls" who survive by taking other sentients as hosts. When the host dies, the Soul is removed and can be placed in a new host.
  • Planet of Hats: This is how every planet taken over by the Souls is described. A deconstructed trope, since it is also mentioned that the stereotype doesn't really fit at all. The planethattery is all about giving new people a simple and efficient, although inaccurate, summary of the species that inhabit the planet.
  • Plant Aliens: Some of the other species that Wanderer has encountered are this.
  • Puppeteer Parasite: Played straight but very oddly, with the invaders being basically kind, caring, albeit not always particularly perceptive individuals who just aren't really aware of just how atrocious their treatment of other species is. Some of the hosts survive the process, others do not, depending on a range of factors.
  • Race Lift: In the book, Melanie is described as having tanned skin and is part Latina on her mother's side; in the Movie she is played by the white Saoirse Ronan (who is Irish, making this also crossover into Fake American).
  • Really 700 Years Old: Wanderer claims to be thousands of Earth years old, though she admits that she's lost count of her real age.
  • Red Shirt: Walter. Up until his death throes, the only real characterization he has is "Supports Wanderer." When his death scene rolls around, it just serves to illustrate how caring and sensitive Wanderer is.
  • Sarcastic Confession: Maggie accuses Wanda of this when she denies that Kyle attacked her.
  • Sense Freak: Understandable, since in the story, humans have the most (and most vivid) senses out of any species the Souls have ever taken as hosts. Wanderer's even warned about it ahead of time; apparently it's in the brochure. Humans are the only species the Souls have ever encountered who have a sense of smell distinct from a sense of taste.
  • Sharing a Body: The general premise.
  • Starfish Aliens: According to Wanderer, there are a grand total of exactly zero remotely humanoid species in the universe. So much so that they have to give new names to different species due to new mouths. The Souls themselves also qualify.
  • Stealth Pun: The See Weeds.
  • Stockholm Syndrome:
    • We never get to know how much of Wanderer's transformation is caused by this dynamic. It is definitely not the only factor, and the reasons why she came to the desert in the first place are surely more important. But the classic pattern is definitely in place as she is captured, subjected to systematic torture and then gradually introduced and accepted into society. (While they don't beat her up very often, the constant sensory deprivation, permanent threat of death, rough living conditions and constant bullying could break almost anyone down.)
    • Some people think this could be the reason behind Melanie and Jared's relationship. Jared forces a kiss on her upon meeting her and Melanie is initially disgusted by this. However, after he allows her and her brother to stay, then Melanie gives into his desire for her.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Especially when it comes to medicine, which is almost ridiculously effective, ridding the body of infection, fever, cancer, whatever, pretty much instantly.
  • Symbiotic Possession: Wanda and Melanie finally become friends after Wanda spends some time with other humans.
  • Take a Third Option: The humans do this when they implant Wanderer into another human host whose original personality didn't survive rather than either killing her like she wanted them to or sending her to another Soul-controlled planet.
  • Time Abyss: The Souls. They have been around for several thousands of years and can live forever (though they can be killed by outside means). They even spend up to centuries in hibernation when they are traveling in space. At one point, Wanderer, who has been around for so long that she's lost track of her own age, can only pinpoint an event as being "after the dinosaurs lived on Earth".
  • Torture Technician: Wanderer believes Doc to be this at first.
  • Totalitarian Utilitarian: Deconstructed, with how the Soul society is anything but totalitarian. On the contrary, their complete lack of Big Brother Is Watching You is what makes the rebels able to operate in the first place.
  • Totally 18: Wanderer lies (to everybody in general, and to Ian in particular) about the age of her new host body - in this way, and for the associated reasons.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Wanda loves Cheetos.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means: The aliens certainly believe that it does.
  • Viewers Are Geniuses: Given that the story is told from the first-person perspective of an alien, there's a lot of subtext in the characterizations that isn't readily apparent. This leads to characters like the Seeker, Maggie, Sharon and Kyle coming off as two-dimensional Designated Villains. Meyer could have put more work into fleshing out their motives and histories.
  • Wasteland Elder: Melanie's uncle, Jeb, is leading a group of about thirty-five people hiding in a system of natural caverns during the Puppeteer Parasite invasion. Jeb discovered the caverns and reserves a right to veto any votes by the rest of the community that go against his liking (with a flippant comment in the book and with his gun in the movie). However, his vetoes are all intelligent ones, and he has a fairly easy-going demeanor.
  • We Used to Be Friends: Zigzagged, with Sharon hating Wanda, who is inhabiting the body of her cousin and best friend, although she remains stiff even after it becomes clear Melanie may still be in there, having Took a Level in Jerkass since the last memories Wanda/Melanie has of her.
  • Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": As the Souls are beginning to realize that adult humans are now growing resistant to alien possession, they instead pick up the habit of systematically "discarding" all adult humans. The horror and true meaning of this practice is only dawning to some of the Souls, and only gradually.
  • Writers Cannot Do Math - After Wes's death, the book says Jeb's community has 35 living bodies in it. This number includes one body which is both Melanie and Wanda. Subsequently, this number is increased by 3: Sunny and Candy are added, and Wanda is given a separate body; no evidence present of any bodies dying or leaving the community; yet at the end Jared says they are 37.


Alternative Title(s): The Host Meyer, The Host 2013, The Host

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