RogerBW's Blog

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell 31 July 2025

2024 horror-romance-fantasy. Shesheshen just wants to be left to rest, but the monster hunters have come into her lair and woken her from hibernation.

Shesheshen is, in theory, a terribly powerful amorphous monster, able to reuse organs from the people and animals she eats. But she has a near-fatal abreaction to rosemary, and the hunters use that against her, So she falls unconscious into the company of Homily, who is the one kind person in this world, and doesn't know that she is a monster…

And if her biting off a bunch of people's heads was how Homily learned her identity, it would probably stifle their relationship. Romance was awful. She couldn't even do something as simple as murdering rude people anymore

So it's the shoggoth lesbian romance I've been waiting for… or is it? Up to a point. Shesheshen is supposedly supremely powerful and has been the terror of the region for years… yet every time she actually gets into a fight, she comes off worst. Well, fair enough. There's a noble family that is determined to wipe her out (after her mother laid eggs in their father and the offspring ate their way out), and they're just mindlessly cruel, apparently in imitation of the abusive Baroness their mother…

But Wiswell wants to make a Point about abuse, several Points in fact, and I increasingly felt that the story was being warped in service of that. Yes, the history is very carefully set up so that exactly this revelation can happen at the exact right moment. And again. And again.

There are so many small scenes of an attempt to make things better followed by their becoming worse that I found myself impatient; this might have worked better at novella length.

Overall I liked the thing, but it did feel like a slog at times. If you are more engaged by the writing and don't find it as repetitive as I did, the book may work better for you.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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