Someone You Can Build a Nest In
By John Wiswell
- Genre
- Fantasy & Magical Realism
- Publisher
- DAW Books (Astra Publishing House)
- Publication year
- 2024
- ISBN
- 9780756418854
Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster who hibernates in a manor's ruins, until she is wounded, rescued by a kind human woman named Homily, and falls in love with her, all while Homily's monster-hunting family closes in. John Wiswell's debut, told from the monster's point of view, won the 2024...
The heroine of John Wiswell's Nebula-winning debut is a monster - Shesheshen, a shapeshifting creature who nests in the bones of her prey and quite reasonably regards humans as either threats or lunch. Then a gentle, put-upon woman named Homily nurses the wounded Shesheshen back to health, mistaking her for human, and the monster finds herself experiencing the most alarming condition of all: love. Told entirely from Shesheshen's gloriously alien point of view, Someone You Can Build a Nest In is a cozy horror-romance that is by turns tender, gruesome and very funny, upending fairy-tale conventions to sympathize wholly with the beast. Beneath the eyeball-eating whimsy runs a real story about abuse, chosen family and learning to be loved, as Homily's monster-hunting relatives threaten them both. Wiswell balances the macabre and the heartfelt with rare deftness. For readers who like their romance strange and their fantasy playful, it is a delightful, boundary-blurring original - and a popular, prize-winning debut.