Let’s finish up.
There’s a bonus chapter the author did:

I am hearing Wanda’s voice in my memory, thinking her last thought. It’s just an echo in my head now, the way I can remember anyone’s voice. She’s not here
I’m so afraid, she said.
I feel her fear again, remembering.
I let her be lost. I did that.

that’s all Melanie wangsting about how Wanda died for her sins or something.

This is Wanda’s gift to me, paid for with her silver blood. Jared and I, put together again as if she’d never lived. As if she hadn’t saved us both.
If I accept this gift, I profit from her death. I kill her again. I take her sacrifice and make it murder.

I’m not kidding. Wanda is now shitty Jesus.

While this is happening, Jared is talking to get to get her to wake up.

He’s got my right hand, so instead of punching, I throw out a vicious backhand with my left, catching his face across the cheekbone. The force of the blow stings in the bones of my hand.
He sucks in a shocked breath and jumps back, dropping my wrist. Freed now I follow the first hit with a good, strong uppercut that glances off the side of his jaw as he ducks away.
Long ago I told Wanda I didn’t think I’d be able to hit Jared, no matter what. Now all I want is to hit him harder.

Beyond the Jesus brainslug, I have no idea what the point of this is. Apparently it was written because the author was thinking about the incoming movie and how that’d need more POVs, and so she thought about how Melanie might have felt, and by “thought about” she meant using Melanie to go on about how the sparkleyeerk has ascended to sue godhood.

She goes into a hysterical temper tantrum at Jared for killing her brainslug sister because women, you know? So crazy. Naturally Wanda-chan is already fine, because god forbid any woman accomplish anything in this.

There is no one in my head but me.
So of course I feel horribly alone.

I didn’t get into this in the main story, but it’s actually a tactic I’d like to see explored – I remember later Animorphs getting into yeerks who became friends with their human hosts on very rare occasion, and if you think about it, humans are really social and hate being alone, so having another person in your head might actually be pretty nice if you got along. I know non-brainslug versions of a chatty voice in your head are usually pretty positive unless the voice is actively malevolent.

It seems the sparkleyeerks are particularly well set up for this given that it seems not only do the host memories overwrite them but they overwrite the host, so you end up with two very similar people. If they just had body sharing that was closer to actual yeerks rather than total control + accidentally killing the personality most of the time, it could work out interestingly.

Anyway, back to what we’re actually given, Melanie’s really impressed by Jared nearly cutting the doctor’s throat to save her brainslug sister and blah blah filler ramble filler BRAINSLUG SISTER everyone loves her so much Jared Jared Kyle brainslug…

She goes to tell Ian and bond over their love for her and when he gets mad to learn about plan commit suicide for no reason she’s all offended and rants about how hard their precious Wanda-chan had it and how she wasn’t just some quitter and yes she fucking was Melanie. A selfish quitter too since she could totally have committed mother-suicide which she apparently thought was something her race needed, not sure why given they’re basically immortal but she felt bad about it and said it was something she should have done instead of continuing to jump around planets. So…she could’ve just gone and done that!

Finally, they go out to go steal a new life for the brainslug to take over.

I feel strong again. This will be put right. Soon.

I will say this completely fits with the repeated bit about how humans are selfish and don’t give a fuck about people beyond their own group.

What’s most annoying is there actually is a solution to the “parasite” wangst that isn’t suicide or not giving a shit about hosts if they’re not humans. The brainslugs could always just restrict themselves to the hosts who don’t seem to mind them, like the spiders. So fucking what if the spiders don’t see color, HUMAN science can stick new rods and cones in animals with genetic engineering, I’m pretty sure you guys can manage that. Not to mention they breed insanely fast, so even traditional husbandry should let you modify them a lot considering the brainslugs are immortal.

But no, instead they’re inflicting them on the rest of the species and the occasional human they don’t think wants to live enough.

There’s also an interview, which is mostly just stupid but does inform me this book was supposedly an adult and not YA book, leaving me even more baffled by how things are classified because this sure read like YA. I guess the difference is that Melanie was twenty rather than a teenager. Also:

You have referred to The Host as being a science fiction novel for people who don’t like science fiction. Can you explain why?

Reading The Host doesn’t feel like reading science fiction; the world is familiar, the body you as the narrator are moving around inside of is familiar, the emotions on the faces of the people around you are familiar. It’s very much set in this world, with just a few key differences. If it weren’t for the fact that alien stories are by definition science fiction, I wouldn’t classify it in that genre.

So, if like me you were wondering why there’s all this stuff in the book and all of none of it is actually explored, that’s why! She was able to figure out that brainslugs taking over the world would change things, she just didn’t want it to change things, so she ignored that part of it to the best of her ability.

So, how do we fix this mess?

Well, like I said, you could make a decent story by just cutting out most of it. But it wouldn’t be a very satisfying one, since the remaining chapters would be the ones that raised interesting questions but there’d still be no chapters devoted to answering those. I’d prefer a jump between the brainslug deciding to join the humans to her just having done that, the end, to the pile of crap we actually got, but I’d have much, much rather seen that explored well.

If it’s going to be an actual novel, more needs to be done.

I think the core problem was the focus shifting from the brainslug-dominant world to her being a hapless prisoner at the human’s mercy. For the majority of the story, she’s in the one place where humans call the shots. That’s really not using the setting of brainslug victory very well.