We Are the Ants

Overview

Shaun David Hutchinson's novel follows Henry Denton, a teenager reeling from the suicide of his boyfriend and struggling to hold together a household strained by financial hardship and grief. Layered atop this realistic portrait of loss is a stranger claim: Henry says he has been repeatedly taken aboard an alien ship and handed a countdown of 144 days, at the end of which he alone must decide whether the Earth continues to exist.

The novel moves between Henry's day-to-day life — school, family friction, a tentative new relationship — and the unresolved question of whether the abductions are real, a delusion born of trauma, or something in between. Hutchinson never rushes to settle that ambiguity, letting Henry's numbness and disbelief in his own worth sit alongside the cosmic stakes he claims to carry.

What results is less a science-fiction premise than a framing device for a story about depression, survivor's guilt, and the slow, uneven work of deciding that a life is worth continuing, whether that life is a single person's or an entire planet's.

Grief, Delusion, and the Weight of Choosing to Stay

The countdown structure gives Hutchinson a way to literalize a question that grief often asks in the abstract: is the world worth staying in? By tying planetary survival to one damaged teenager's judgment, the book externalizes the internal calculus of depression, where deciding to keep going can feel just as consequential and just as uncertain as any world-ending choice. The alien-abduction thread is left genuinely unresolved, and that refusal to confirm or deny Henry's account is central to the book's design — it keeps the reader inside his unreliable, grief-fogged perspective rather than outside judging it.

The novel sits within a broader wave of contemporary YA that treats queer teen protagonists and mental illness as ordinary narrative ground rather than issues to be solved by the plot. Henry's sexuality, his relationship with his late boyfriend, and his tentative new romantic interest are handled as facts of his life rather than points of crisis in themselves; the crisis is grief, not identity. Reviewers and readers have generally responded to the book as a sincere, sometimes darkly funny meditation on suicide and recovery, and it has become one of Hutchinson's more widely discussed works for pairing genre premise with unflinching emotional realism.

Why We Are the Ants Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel have centered on its frank treatment of suicide, including the death that opens the book and Henry's own ongoing suicidal ideation, with challengers arguing that the material is too dark or too explicit for the intended teen audience. The book's sexual content, including scenes involving Henry's relationships, has also drawn objection, as has its depiction of a gay teenage protagonist, which some challengers have framed as inappropriate subject matter for school libraries and classrooms. Profanity and general "mature content" concerns round out the recurring complaints. Taken together, these objections reflect discomfort less with the book's literary ambitions than with its willingness to portray a queer teenager's depression, sexuality, and suicidal crisis without softening the details — the same qualities that have made it, in the accounting kept by this catalog, one of the more frequently challenged titles, with recorded objections in 8 states and 22 districts.