Fiction Reviews
Someone You Can Build A Nest In
(2024) John Wiswell, Jo Fletcher Books, £14.99, trdpbk, 310pp, ISBN978-1-529-43134-6
There are two likely initial reactions to Someone To Build A Nest In, and neither do it justice. You might the dismiss the premise of a chaste fantasy romance with a shape-shifting monster as bad fan fic in traditionally published clothing. Alternatively, you might be fully behind the concept but have low expectations of it as a piece of work.
Both takes fall down against the simple fact that this is a very good novel indeed.
So read on while I try to explain why Nest has broader appeal than you might think, why its part-cosy/part Cronenberg interspecies intimacy is a feature, not a bug, and why one could even say it is a book that had to be written.
Shesheshen is a ‘wyrm’ – a shape-shifting predatory ball of goo living alone in the wilderness outside the small town of Underlook. Her taste in food is bloody but broad, but she’ll take human where she can get it, assimilating organs and bones to pass as one of the local people and dodge the occasional attempt to hunt her down.
All this changes when she encounters the aristocratic Wulfyre family, absentee rulers of the area, who are convinced she has cursed them unto ruin and death and seek to hunt her down. This is news to Shesheshen, who’d rather eat her enemies and absorb them into herself than resort to magic, even if she knew how to do it.
The Wulfyres have a type – that type being dark triad armed with pointy weapons and scads of money – but Homily Wulfyre breaks the mould. Kind, a naturalist and researcher, and unhelpfully attracted to the ‘wrong’ gender, as far as her abusive family are concerned. When she and Shesheshen meet without knowing each other, a mutual attraction and strong connection quickly develops.
Another problem: Shesheshen’s kind reproduce by laying eggs in a human host, which means any relationship with Homily could be short and decidedly terminal.
One does not need to take a psychological approach to reading Nest or analysing its author – themes of disability, marginalisation, asexual romance and abusive families are upfront in the work and are text not subtext. Wiswell is clearly concerned to write a story where people on these axes overcome multiple adversities and get a happy ending.
It is a task that fantasy is uniquely well suited to do, as of all genres only it could support a central character like Shesheshen that can simultaneously embody all of these themes and make her convincing and likeable.
That by definition, makes Nest an important book. The fantasy genre doesn’t get to have important books very often and it should take this one to its heart, because it’s also (and here’s the message for everyone) it’s also extremely well written. It drops into romance, adventure and horror tropes beautifully without breaking its stride – it has a tremendous sense of comic timing to boot and the Wulfyres manage to be both the worst potential in-laws ever and genuine monsters.
Someone To Build A Nest In is a book that will make people feel like it was written for them. For the rest of us, it’s an incredible piece of work that reminds me that fantasy can be more than the rearrangement of old tropes.
Tim Atkinson
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