Someone You Can Build a Nest In was, in fact, pretty good, but it went in a different direction than I was hoping for and I'm not sure how to feel about it.
The story follows Shesheshen, a solitary shapeshifting monster who hunts the travelers and merchants that pass through her territory, along with the occasional monster hunters who come to slay her. She is rather lonely, and reminisces fondly and lovingly about her mother, who was slain when she was young, and her father, whose body she grew inside and who she ate her way out of when she was ready to be born. On her hunts, she keeps an eye out for someone who might make for a similarly loving parent to plant her own eggs in. After a close encounter with some hunters while in a roughly human shape, Shesheshen is nurses back to health by a kind woman who has mistaken her for human, and promptly falls head over heels. Before she can get around to explaining her true nature and enquire about how her newly beloved would feel about being a parent, they are both drawn into a new and concerted effort to hunt down the local monster - Sheshen herself. Hijinks, of course, ensue.
The thing that immediately captured me when I started reading was how well the narration captured Shesheshen's fundamental inhumanity while still making her layered, complex, and intelligent. Her visceral emotional reactions are shaped by her biological nature as a predator, and these emotions lead to distinctly inhuman values and morals - Shesheshen places no intrinsic value on human lives and feels no compunctions whatsoever about eating sentient people. Her love and lust are consumptive in nature, and she romanticizes this. The fact that she cannot have her cake and eat it too is something she has difficulty dealing with. But she's also capable of a great deal of sympathy and empathy for specific humans, and the love she has for the father she ate causes her to care a great deal about consent - she doesn't want to consume out of love someone who doesn't want to be consumed.
In addition to her psychology, Shesheshen's physiology is also excellently inhuman and conveyed in great visceral detail, and the way her body functions is very interesting. My favorite parts of the book are the introduction and the denouement, because these are the areas where her psychology and physiology receive the most undivided attention. They aren't ignored throughout the rest of the book by any means, but they take a backseat to the plot, which is why I feel a bit conflicted about the book as a whole. I was really enjoying the in-depth character study of the introduction, and would've really liked to have the whole book be in that vein.
The plot, to be clear is not bad - it's honestly quite good, and it delves heavily into themes of generational and familial trauma, self-sacrifice, the normalization and romanticization of profound harm, and the difficulty of growth and self-actualization, all while being fairly entertaining and well-executed as a story. I think its themes were a bit heavy-handed in places, and I think some of its exploration was hobbled and flattened by the book's queernorm setting, but I won't relitigate that old argument here. It was suitably gripping and solidly entertaining.
I think the central relationship was solid and compelling, though again, I would've liked it more if the whole book had been focused on a deep exploration of their characters and dynamics. There's a lot of rich ground to the basic premise of "monster falls in love with human, wants to express that love in a way that is actively dangerous/horrifying to the human, doesn't know how to talk about it", and the story layers additional complexities onto that dynamic that are very compelling, but for as much of that interesting ground that the book explored, it left plenty more untouched. One detail that I did find both novel and enjoyable is that both the love interest Homily and Shesheshen herself are all but explicitly sex-averse asexuals by human standards, which is something I have not encountered in a lot of media. The exploration of that experience is not particularly deep because, again, queernorm, but it is present and it was compelling.
This was a really unique and compelling read, though, and I expect it to be one that stays with me. Given my own interest in body horror and inhumanity (shameless plug for Memoirs of a Flesh Eater in the notes), I wouldn't be surprised to see some influences from this book in my own writing going forward.
On the whole, I definitely enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it, but not without a few warnings. Body horror is a constant element in this book; Shesheshen's shapeshifting is purposely off-putting, and she eats people. This is described in substantial detail. Also, there is a lot of parental and familial abuse depicted, much more than you would expect from the basic premise, so go in prepared. On the other hand, though, if you're looking for a true gothic horror tragic toxic doomed romance or a heavy character study that really plumbs the depths of an inhuman psyche, you will probably be frustrated by how close it comes to being that without actually being that.
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