My Name Isn't Paul by Drew Huff

I pretended to be human for the last seven years and it finally caught up to me.

That’s all I can say. I’m a bug. I’m a parasitic wasp-thing. I think. Fuck. I hardly even know. What I am, I mean. So now I’m sitting in the ‘85 Lincoln, holding a spray can of wasp killer, wondering if it’ll kill me before the cops find me.

I’m dry-heaving, or least the human-looking part of me is. I don’t know what my filaments are doing. Shivering?

Red and blue lights flash through the neighbourhood around me and play over the two-bedroom houses. There are no sirens. The police cars slither up the road. There’s been a murder in the house behind me. Some guy killed his wife. Someone called it in.

I pop the wasp spray can off and on again. Click. Click. Click.

Paul Cattano appears to be a 40 year-old vacuum salesman ‘with a thick dark moustache and ratty little eyes.’ For the last seven years however Paul was in fact Uxxon, a parasitic alien wasp made up of a tangle of thousands of tiny silver filaments. Uxxon had hatched along with their larval siblings from their meat-parent seven years ago, consuming them from the inside-out, floating into the world with the ability to take on a perfect facsimile of anything, living or dead. After their violent birth, Uxxon happened upon the body of Paul in a wood and had been pretending to be him ever since. Every seven years however the wasps find themselves at the start/end of their reproductive cycle, and are taken over by an all-encompassing urge to kill, mate, feed, and lay eggs inside a living human host. The only issue is that Uxxon really likes being Paul, likes his life, doesn’t like being a wasp.

My Name Isn’t Paul is a very short novella, only 67 pages long. Nonetheless, author Drew Huff manages to pack a lot of content into a very short space of time. Just take the content warning as an example: Content Warnings - Death, suicide, violence, accidental animal death (brief and moderately graphic), mentions of domestic abuse, attempt at sexual assault (from a non-human entity without human sexual organs), profanity, self-hatred, mental breakdowns, vomiting, parasites, and humans being eaten from the inside out (off-page, mentioned).

Paul’s character reminded me of the cockroach alien from Men in Black, and overall the story feels thematically quite similar with a focus very much on grand guignol and dark humour. The aliens all talk to each other like blue collar middle aged American slobs, world weary and cynical despite only being seven years old and seemingly on their way to either consuming or replacing the entire human race. While the other aliens seem to accept their lot, Paul/Uxxon seems to find their parasitic wasp-like tendencies distasteful, leading to an incredibly violent existential crisis.

The story does not fuck about at all, spending the bare minimum time on world building before deciding to go fully off the rails. Less than twenty pages into the novella Uxxon is already losing the plot, killing strangers in petrol stations and doing all they can to copulate with as many wasps as they can. There are decapitations galore, liquification of corpses, insects laying eggs in human meat, countless people getting shot in the head, and a sky full of Cthulhu mythos and Great Old Ones looming over all the proceedings.

I found this a wild ride, the rapid fire prose and zero chill making it something very easy to consume and finish in an afternoon. However the explosive and unrelenting nature of the story was also the main reason My Name Isn’t Paul didn’t work as well as it could have. There were some incredible ideas, concepts, mechanics and general world building going on in this story, but none of it was given the space to breathe. As soon as characters were introduced they were either killed, inseminated, eaten or driven insane. There was mentions of Paul’s life, but no major insight or depth provided. Even the concept that Uxxon took over the life of a pretty terrible person who they found dead in a wood and made many aspects of that person’s life much better would have been a very compelling narrative to explore further. The mechanics of the creatures feeding and mating habits barely made sense and the general socio-political dimensions of the parasitic alien race remained vague and underexplored.

I think if My Name Isn’t Paul was extended by even 100 or so pages the narrative could have been given some more space to breathe. The writing style was punchy, descriptions and renditions of these alien creatures felt very visceral and unique. I find it a shame that it probably won’t find mainstream leadership simply through feeling a bit quick and disposable. I hope Huff reapproaches the concepts and characters and gives us something a bit more substantial because I think they have the workings of a great long-form novel here.

This was a free review copy of My Name Isn’t Paul, which will be self-published by the author in November 2025. Thanks to NetGalley for the free review copy. You can read more about the author Drew Huff here, as well as find details of her other books and a portfolio of book cover art.