How Monsters Fall in Love: A Guest Post by John Wiswell

By John Wiswell / May 8, 2025 at 1:14 am

This romantasy with a monster-of-legend hook is the perfect blend of eerie and whimsical. It’s a modern monster story with a tender heart that is emotionally intelligent and engages in reality and the humanity of its characters. Read on for an exclusive essay from Our Monthly Pick author John Wiswell on writing Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

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Someone You Can Build a Nest In (B&N Exclusive Edition)

By John Wiswell

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Paperback $20.00

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she’s fallen in love.

To the assembled knights and paladins and wizards, storming a monster’s lair is an act of bravery. Confronting the unknown with steel and flame. Descending into shadow is proof of one’s heroism.

For the monster who lives down in that lair? It’s a home invasion.

Any story is an invitation to sympathy and understanding. One of the greatest gifts literature gives us is expanding our empathy, by bringing us into walks of life we otherwise wouldn’t have imagined. And no such life is as juicy a challenge to inhabit as that of a monster. Not a brute, or some politician we can’t stand, but a literal fanged, shapeshifting, unfathomable creature.

That’s where Someone You Can Build a Nest In began.

What you don’t expect when you delve into something inhuman is how much humanity you find in there. I’m neurodivergent and have written my characters through a “mask” of neurotypicality for years. At first, writing Shesheshen’s internal monologue was just funny, as I let her go entirely unmasked in her confusions and frustrations with society. It wasn’t just how annoyed she was at hunters chasing her, or at the hypocrisies of how humans treated one another. It was how she thought. She was funny, and grumpy, and profoundly relatable.

That only grew after Shesheshen almost fell to her death and was rescued by Homily. Homily was a chipper, bookish lady who mistook Shesheshen for a fellow human and unwittingly nursed her back to health. Once they got close, seeing Shesheshen become so violently protective of this sweet person made me adore her more than ever. Shesheshen’s willingness to eat anyone who would dare be rude to Homily made her heroic in another way.

All these connections kept sprouting up between our human experiences and those of this misunderstood creature. In her humor and in her rage, of course, but also in the ineffable attraction to finding someone she could finally connect with and trust. That’s where the most exciting part of this book came from: the numerous ways in which readers connected with Shesheshen.

Autistic readers reached out in tears over how much they saw themselves in her. Disabled readers saw the struggles she went through to make her body presentable, and to keep herself together on exhausting days. Queer readers wrote me the sweetest things, including several emails claiming, “I’m the Homily and my girlfriend is the Shesheshen!”

And it all began when a monster drove some righteous jerks out of her lair. I’m so glad she came out of that lair, and that you were all there to greet her.