“Cozy fantasy” is a delightful trend in genre fiction, and “cozy science-fiction” isn’t far behind. But “cozy horror” has always seemed like an oxymoron. But I can’t think of a better way to describe John Wiswell’s delightfully gory and somehow gentle Someone You Can Build A Nest In.
Shesheshen has carved a quiet but sustainable existence as a monster curled up in her cave, roaming the countryside with her bear friend, and occasionally taking a sheep—or traveler—for dinner. That quiet existence is interrupted by yet another group of monster hunters who just won’t take the hint to leave. Though she comes out on top, a wounded Shesheshen ventures into town in search of a meal to regain her strength. There, Shesheshen finds this band of monster-hunters was only the precursor of a much more threatening campaign against her. Further wounded, she finds herself being tended to by Homily, a young woman who doesn’t see through Shesheshen’s thin human disguise.
As circumstance and unfamiliar interest take Homily and Shesheshen quickly from nursemaid and patient to something far friendlier, Shesheshen finds her thoughts drifting to the greatest commitment her kind could make: asking Homily to be a vessel—a nest, if you will—for Shesheshen’s clutch of eggs. The arrival of Homily’s family keeps Shesheshen from proposing to Homily. The family believes they have been cursed by a monster and only carving the heart out of that monster—Shesheshen—can break it. Shesheshen stays close to try to steer the hunting party astray, and to protect Homily from the pervasive abuse of her family. What she learns in the process, however, teaches Shesheshen more about love and family than she knew there was to learn—and reframes the story she always believed about her own hatching.
Shesheshen’s time in the human world is a classic story of a fish out of water, yet Wiswell wisely refrains from low-hanging gags about the strangeness of civilization and instead weaves a story that felt very much coded as a neurodivergent experience. Her swift affection for Homily, even when she doesn’t yet know what it means to love another creature, is overwhelming to her, but sweet to observe. Easy to understand, too, with how lovely Wiswell draws this monster’s love interest. At times, the love story feels almost like some retelling of Beauty and the Beast—there’s even an attempt to teach Shesheshen how to read near the end—but goes far beyond homage territory as each earnestly seeks to understand the trauma carried by the other. (For anyone intrigued or turned off by the thought of monster-on-human love scenes, this is not the book for you; this is a purely asexual love story, and a worthy shout-out during this, Asexual Awareness Week 2024.)
The love story might be the “cozy” part of this book, but there’s plenty of horror, too. Shesheshen is no air-quotes monster—she is a many-tentacled thing, a predator who feeds on weaker creatures, including people, to survive. While never straying into the overly gory, some descriptions of conflict or hunting do toe the line. And there’s plenty of monstrosities during the monster hunt itself, from Shesheshen and others alike. And the climax and big reveals near the end are worthy of any creature feature.
Wiswell, however, is not satisfied with letting his surviving characters walk (or limp) into the sunset. The last section of the book is instead an exploration of what happens after the final battle, when the emotional wounds linger, and sometimes fester, even after the physical ones have healed. When a being has to face the choices they made in the heat of the moment, no matter how dire the circumstances were or how impossible those choices felt to make. It’s a move that might make some readers feel the pacing of Someone You Can Build A Nest In is off, or that it ends with a whisper instead of a bang. But as I’ve let it digest within me, much like a sheep or ruffian in Shesheshen, it’s that section that perhaps lets the heart it’s been building finally beat: when characters make choices not prompted by violence, peril, or adrenaline, but what suits then when they begin to return to themselves and all the days that come afterward.
Ring Reads 