Someone You Can Build a Nest In

John Wiswell
Completed 3/23/2025, Reviewed 3/24/2025
5 stars

(Scroll down for a reread update)

Loved this book.  It was a little like Grendl, told from a monster’s POV, but with great dark humor in the beginning which sucks you in.  Then when it gets serious, it’s too late.  You’re hooked and have to see it to the end.  It’s the most original and imaginative book I’ve read in a long while.  It was nominated for a 2024 Nebula Award, having read two nominees so far, this is the one to beat.  

The book begins when a monster, mistakenly called a wyrm, is awakened from hibernation by wyrm hunters.  They’ve found and entered her lair.  The monster, known as Shesheshen, is mostly a blob, but can shapeshift into anything if she has recently eaten something like it.  Shesheshen swallows some bones from her lair and poses as a human girl in a red riding hooded cape 😊 and tries to escape.  She ends up killing and eating one of the hunters, with the other two escaping.  She goes into town in this form, but is spotted by the other two hunters.  When she goes out into town again, she uses the bones from the dead hunter to construct a new body, named Siobhan.  After a series of events, she falls down a ravine.  She wakes up being taken care of by a woman named Homily.  It’s clear from the inuendo that Homily is attracted to Siobhan, who after some deliberation, decides that Homily is a good enough person to build a nest in and lay her eggs.  However, as time goes on, Siobhan starts to feel affection for Homily and a complicated relationship unfolds.  It is marred however, by the family of the eaten hunter who is out to kill the monster, who they say has cursed the family.  

Long plot description, but a lot happens at the beginning of the story.  It is told third person from Shesheshen’s POV, and begins with much dark humor about eating people, the tastiness of marrow, the use of their bones and organs for posing as a human, and the finding of someone to lay eggs who can lovingly let the newborn monsters eat their way out of them for nourishment.  Even when as Siobhan, she starts hanging with Homily, the tentativeness of the development of their relationship is also humorous.  Homily and the monster are wonderful characters.  The monster, of course, because she is naïve about how her appetite for people affects other people, although she has always been careful to only eat people who are banes to society.  Homily is a much more complicated character.  She was terribly abused by her family and doesn’t have any survival skills or defense mechanisms to function as an adult when in any sort of conflict with them.  

It starts to get more serious when the Baroness appears with her two daughters.  It turns out the dead hunter was her son, and now she is on a rampage to avenge his death.  The Baroness and her daughters are pure evil.  They have no redeeming qualities.  I’d say they’re two-dimensional, but I also found them believable.  An abusive mother who has groomed her children to be ruthless, cunning, and entitled like herself.  It’s often hard to read the sections where Homily interacts with them, knowing what a kind person she is from her relationship with Siobhan.  This can be a trigger for some, because the abuse is realistic.  Fortunately, Siobhan has a reasonable understanding of human behavior, having spent most of her life eating those who deserved it.  She comes to Homily’s defense and plots her own way to take out the family.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  It’s shockingly fantastic for a first novel.  I adored Shesheshen and her growing relationship with Homily.  The showdown with Baroness is fantastic, but more interestingly, the epilogue chapters could have started their own sequel.  The prose is wonderful.  The world building simply fantastic.  The characters, all very believable.  I highly recommend this book for anyone with a dark sense of humor and who can handle reading the abuse.

Update 4/10/2026

I reread this book for Powell’s in-person book club.  I couldn’t remember if it was my nomination or Christine’s this time.  We both nominated it several times.  In case it was me and I have to moderate, I reread it more carefully.  I realized a few things this time.  First, this is called body-horror because of the grossness of Shesheshen the monster, how it eats, and how it assembles itself.  I’ve used the term for movies, but this is the first time for a book.  Second, it still felt like a cozy read.  One might say this is a contradiction, but when I read it, I just want to be wrapped up in a quilt, drinking candy coffee, and gleefully giggling at all the gory, macabre humor.

My favorite part of this book is that it’s told from Shesheshen’s perspective, 3rd person omniscient.  So, we get all of her thoughts on everything around her.  To me, they are poignant and often hysterical.  I wanted to share some of the quotes I loved the most:

• The most life available was a decades-old wheel of goat’s cheese, which over time had filled the air with festive spores.

• If Shesheshen ever went near those flocks [of sheep], droves of human guards would descend on her.  Meanwhile townsfolk wore the wool while eating those very animals.  And somehow Shesheshen was the monster.  Had she ever worn a human while she ate them?

• It was the older families that clutched most of the wealth, even though it was harvested by the laborers.  What the laborers got out of it that kept them from eating the rich, Shesheshen didn’t understand.  She was a mere monster.

• And to be fair, Homily did look delicious.

• Following her worst encounters with monster hunters, Shesheshen had often disemboweled a young buck to calm herself.  Comfort food was not alien to her.

I love how Wiswell takes a common phrase or word and apply it so it’s gross or macabre.  I also love how it asks the question, “Who’s the real monster?”  It may be a common trope, but it is applied here so well.  

I still consider this a 5-star book. It presses all the right buttons for me.  Inventive story, great writing, dark humor.  I came to love the main characters despite one of them being a gross monster.  And I was caught up in the unfolding of the asexual love story.  I simply loved the great feeling I got whenever I picked up the book.

Oh yeah, and it was nominated for a 2025 Hugo and won the 2024 Nebula.