The Honeys by Ryan La Sala

Ryan La Sala’s The Honeys arrives with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what kind of book they want to make and possesses every tool required to make it. Published by Push, Scholastic’s imprint dedicated to voices that push against the edges of YA convention, this is a queer horror novel that uses the language of genre with genuine fluency: the atmospheric dread, the slow accumulation of wrongness, the moment when the familiar tips into something that cannot be explained away. But it is also something rarer, a book that understands its own thematic architecture and builds toward it with real intelligence. The Honeys is not a book about horror. It is a book about the violence that passes as normal until someone refuses to stop seeing it.

The setup is elegantly strange. Mars, a nonbinary teenager, arrives at Aspen Conservancy Summer Camp to find out what happened to his twin sister Caroline, who suffered a breakdown severe enough to send her home mid-season. Mars and Caroline have always been close in the particular way of twins who share a frequency others cannot quite hear. Her collapse feels wrong to him in a way he cannot articulate, and the camp’s official explanations feel even wronger. What he finds at Aspen is a place that radiates unease from every direction: the social hierarchies are too rigid, the traditions too entrenched, the adults too willing to look away. And then there are the Honeys, Caroline’s elite cabin group, who keep bees with a dedication that crosses from hobby into something approaching religion.

La Sala controls this material with assurance. The horror builds through texture rather than incident, through details that accumulate in the reader’s peripheral vision before announcing themselves as significant. The bees. The honey. The way the Honeys move together, the way they look at Mars, the way they seem to know things they should not know. The camp itself functions as a space where particular kinds of cruelty have been institutionalized so thoroughly that they look like tradition, and La Sala renders this with a precision that earns its horror rather than borrowing it.

Character Arcs

Mars is one of the most fully realized protagonists in recent YA horror, and the fullness comes from the way La Sala grounds gender identity not as an issue to be resolved but as a perspective through which the world is seen. Mars moves through the world as someone accustomed to being misread, which means he has developed a precise and somewhat exhausting vigilance about how others perceive him. At camp, where gender sorting is enforced with architectural efficiency, that vigilance becomes both a survival skill and a source of real pain. He is placed in the boys’ cabin, where the particular performances of masculinity that boys use to regulate each other operate at full volume, and he must navigate this while also trying to understand what happened to his sister.

The twin relationship is the emotional spine of the book. La Sala understands that twins in fiction often function as doubles or foils, one the shadow of the other, and he refuses this. Mars and Caroline are distinct people who happen to share an unusual intimacy, and the investigation into Caroline’s breakdown is also an investigation into who she was when Mars was not watching, which means who she was when she could be fully herself. The discovery of that self, and what it cost her, hits with genuine emotional weight.

The Honeys themselves are a study in collective identity. As a group, they function almost as a single organism: beautiful, purposeful, unsettling. But La Sala gives them individual textures that prevent them from becoming simple antagonists. They are not villains in the conventional sense. They are girls who have found a way to survive a world that requires their complicity and extracted something useful, even something empowering, from that survival. The book does not excuse what they have done, but it understands how they came to do it.

Mars’s arc across the novel moves from grief and confusion through active investigation into a kind of clarity that is more disturbing than the confusion was. What he discovers about Aspen, about the Honeys, and about what was done to his sister requires him to reckon with the limits of the protection he could have offered her, and with the question of what he is willing to do about it now. This reckoning does not arrive as a tidy epiphany. It arrives as a decision, and the decision feels earned.

Pacing

La Sala paces the novel with real skill, understanding that horror depends on the management of information. He releases details in a sequence calibrated to keep the reader slightly off-balance: enough is explained to maintain comprehension, but not enough to close down the sense that something is being withheld. The camp setting helps with this. Summer camp as a fictional space has its own established rhythms, its progression from arrival through orientation through the social negotiations of cabin life, and La Sala uses those rhythms as a scaffold, letting the reader feel oriented in the familiar structure while the horror accumulates in the corners.

The middle section of the novel is particularly strong. This is where lesser horror fiction tends to flag, when the premise has been established but the resolution is not yet in sight, but La Sala fills this space with discoveries that complicate rather than simply advance the plot. Each revelation changes the shape of what Mars is investigating. The mystery deepens rather than merely expanding, which means that by the time the final act arrives, the reader has as much at stake as Mars does.

The horror set pieces are well-executed and feel genuinely original. La Sala has imagined a specific kind of horror that belongs to this book and this premise: a horror that is organic, collective, and tied to systems of gender and power in ways that make it feel like the externalization of something already present in the world. The bees, in particular, are deployed with real ingenuity. They are never just bees, but the book never explains them out of existence either.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The novel’s central subject is toxic masculinity, but La Sala approaches this subject with more sophistication than that phrase might suggest. He is not primarily interested in individual bad actors. He is interested in systems: the systems that produce and reward certain performances of masculinity, that enforce those performances through social pressure and ritual humiliation, that make the world navigable for boys who comply and genuinely dangerous for those who do not. Aspen Conservancy is a machine for producing these systems in concentrated form, and the horror is partly the horror of recognition.

What gives the novel its particular sharpness is that Mars, as a nonbinary person, occupies a position from which these systems are both visible and inescapable. He cannot move through the boys’ cabin without being aware of the performance it demands. He cannot watch the Honeys without understanding that their power is partly a response to the power arranged against them. He is, by the nature of his identity, a figure who has had to think about gender as a system rather than a fact, and this analytical capacity is both a gift and a burden.

The bees and the honey function as the novel’s central symbol with the efficiency of the best genre symbols: they mean many things simultaneously and none of those meanings cancels the others. They suggest community, hierarchy, the violence beneath cooperation, the sweetness extracted from labor, the capacity of nature to be both beautiful and dangerous. They also suggest transformation, the process by which raw material is converted into something that preserves, that heals, that can also intoxicate. La Sala does not belabor this symbolism, but it is structural, built into the novel’s logic at a level deep enough that it resonates rather than announces itself.

The novel also thinks carefully about what grief does to perception. Mars is grieving his sister even though she is still alive, because what happened to her at camp has changed her in ways he does not yet understand, and his investigation is partly a refusal to accept that change without explanation. This kind of grief, anticipatory and unverifiable, gives the narrative an emotional texture that distinguishes it from horror that relies primarily on spectacle.

Style and Voice

La Sala writes with a voice that is alert, precise, and occasionally very funny. The humor is important. Mars has a dry observational quality that prevents the novel from becoming suffocating, and the comedy mostly emerges from the collision between his analytical mind and the earnest absurdities of camp culture. This keeps the reader oriented across the novel’s shifts in register, from character comedy to genuine dread to emotional devastation, without those shifts feeling like category errors.

The prose is efficient in a way that YA horror particularly benefits from: La Sala does not linger in atmospherics for their own sake, but his descriptive choices are precise enough that the atmosphere arrives without being announced. The camp feels specific and real, with the kind of institutional idiosyncrasies that accumulate in places where the same activities have been performed in the same way for decades. The particular quality of light through pine trees, the smell of woodsmoke and sunscreen, the textures of cabin walls: these arrive as incidental details, but they build the world with care.

His handling of Mars’s gender identity is notably unforced. He does not make it the source of the novel’s conflict or position it as something that needs to be resolved. Mars is nonbinary the way people are actually nonbinary: it is a fact about him, one among many, that shapes how he moves through the world without being the explanation for everything that happens to him. This normalizing representation is itself a kind of achievement in a genre that still too often treats queer identity as either the problem to be solved or the lesson to be learned.

Verdict

The Honeys is the most original YA novel of its award year, and it is one of the most assured debuts the genre has seen in a long time. Ryan La Sala has written a book that knows what horror is for: it is for making visible what comfort keeps hidden. The violence inflicted on girls and on gender-nonconforming kids at institutions that reward masculine performance is not supernatural, but La Sala demonstrates that fiction can find forms adequate to its weight. This is a novel that will stay with you in the way that the best horror does, not because it frightened you but because it showed you something true in a way that only genre could deliver. Fully deserving of the 2022 Meridian Award and a strong 5.0.

Frequently Asked Questions about The Honeys

What age group is The Honeys intended for?

The novel is published for Young Adult readers, typically aged 14 and up. It contains horror elements including body horror and violence, as well as frank treatment of gender identity and sexuality. Mature YA readers will handle the material comfortably. Some parents may want to preview the content for readers on the younger end of the YA range.

Is Mars explicitly referred to with they/them pronouns?

Mars uses he/him pronouns in the novel, which La Sala uses consistently throughout. This is one of several ways the novel refuses to treat nonbinary identity as a single uniform experience. Mars is nonbinary and uses he/him, which is a real and valid experience that is underrepresented even within queer YA, where they/them nonbinary characters are more common.

Does the novel resolve the mystery fully?

Yes. The Honeys functions as a mystery-horror hybrid and delivers a complete resolution. The answers to what happened to Caroline and what the Honeys are doing with their bees are revealed in full. The ending does not leave loose threads dangling. What it does do is sit with the emotional complexity of what those answers mean, which is not the same as ambiguity.

Is there a sequel?

As of its award year, The Honeys is a standalone novel. Ryan La Sala has not announced a sequel. The novel resolves completely enough that a sequel is not necessary, though the world and characters could sustain further exploration if La Sala chose to return to them.

How does the horror in this book compare to other YA horror?

La Sala’s horror is more atmospheric and symbolically layered than much YA horror, which tends toward either psychological thriller territory or more explicitly supernatural frameworks. The closest comparisons might be to works like Courtney Summers’s Sadie or Elizabeth Hand’s earlier YA, books that use genre conventions with literary ambition. The bees and the honey give the novel a distinct visual and symbolic identity that sets it apart from contemporaries.

What does the title mean?

“The Honeys” refers to the elite cabin group that Caroline belonged to before her breakdown: a group of girls who keep bees and who are known at camp as the Honeys. The title carries the double meaning that the novel earns throughout: sweetness as surface, with something else entirely operating underneath. It is also a word used to infantilize and feminize, which fits the novel’s concerns about how femininity is constructed and policed.

Does the book address queerness beyond Mars’s gender identity?

Yes. There are romantic elements involving Mars that involve attraction to another character, and the novel’s overall atmosphere is queer in a broader sense: it is interested in who gets to be a self and under what conditions, which is a question that connects gender and sexuality to the social systems the novel examines. The queerness is not incidental decoration but structural to what the book is doing.

What should I read after The Honeys?

Readers who responded to the horror-and-camp setting might try Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians for Indigenous horror with equally strong atmospheric craft. For more queer YA with dark elements, Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli’s work offers emotional intensity without horror. For readers interested specifically in horror that examines gender systems, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is the adult comparison that the novel most rewards reading alongside.