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Someone You Can Build a Nest In
by John Wiswell · 2024
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Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love. Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth. However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out.…
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"The title is literal. Our protagonist is Shesheshen, a shapeshifting monster, for whom lust consists of an overwhelming desire to plant her eggs in someone; they will then become a nest for the young who will feed on their corpse. Unfortunately, she has fallen in love as well as lust, and doesn’t want to subject her beloved Homily to this without her consent. Consent she will struggle to obtain, since Homily’s family is busily hunting down the monster – that’s Shesheshen herself – to lift a family curse. This neat set-up then undergoes a series of satisfying twists and turns. Neither Homily nor Shesheshen know everything there is to know about themselves. As readers, part of the tension comes from waiting to find out whether there is any configuration of the chessboard that would let them be together happily – the rest of the tension comes from constant threats to their lives. Yes and no. She’s relatable enough for us to crack on with the story. But her distance from humanity allows for a lot of fun: she observes human behaviour, from small gestures to social conventions, from the perspective of someone constantly trying to divine the meaning. Some of our peculiarities are endearing to her, some are baffling, many are downright annoying. It allows for Wiswell to make some very sharp observations. It allows for a beautifully unusual love story too, where the two partners can negotiate what their involvement means from the ground up. There’s not only Shesheshen’s nature to manage, but also Homily’s trauma in her monster-obsessed family, as well as simple preferences – so there’s nothing cookie-cutter about their relationship. It feels truly like a love story, rather than a romance story, if I can make that distinction."
"A man-eating monster lurks in a rundown manor. Her name is Shesheshen and she’s tired of people always barging into her swamp pit trying to kill her and messing up her decor. This time, however, she eats the wrong person and winds up pretending to be human to keep the real humans off her back. She also happens to fall for Homily, a woman struggling to survive her abusive family. Secrets pile up as Homily and Shesheshen sort out their queerplatonic feelings toward each other, culminating in a fight that will redefine their futures. It’s a wonderfully queer and fantastically strange novel that has a lot to say about being asexual in an allosexual world."