Murderbot plus tentacles: John Wiswell on his cozy fantasy-horror debut

John Wiswell’s debut novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In was one of Polygon’s most anticipated SFF novels of 2024, and it lived up to that title. It’s an energetic, deeply strange, surprising book whose protagonist, a monster named Shesheshen, strongly reminded me of one of the decade’s most popular SFF protagonists, Martha Wells’ Murderbot. Like Murderbot, Shesheshen is a nonhuman character who struggles to understand human emotion and behavior, and is frustrated and even repelled when she starts experiencing it herself. They share a certain outlook — a loneliness they can’t acknowledge, and an attachment to one human in particular.

Unlike Murderbot, though, Shesheshen is a boneless, shape-shifting, human-eating monster who’s just looking to settle down with a nice partner and lay her eggs in them, so her young can hatch and devour their host from the inside.

And yet this gruesome body-horror novel, packed with detail about the mechanics of life as a carnivorous predator, is more or less a cozy romance. After a particularly damaging monster hunt, Shesheshen connects with a human woman, Homily, and starts to dream about egg-laying. At the same time, their connection starts to change them both, pushing them to confront their assumptions about their families and about each other.

Polygon talked to John Wiswell about what went into the novel, how it reflects his experience with disability and the queer community, and what he learned from Murderbot. And you can also read an excerpt from Someone You Can Build a Nest In on Polygon, as Shesheshen navigates the local town of Underlook in disguise, and finds out they’re celebrating her death.

Polygon: You’ve said this was a book you’ve been working toward writing for your entire life. How so?

John Wiswell: I’ve been publishing short fiction for 15 years, and a lot of it has been about seeing humanity in the inhuman, and using speculative fiction as a way to reflect largely marginalized experiences. Like how you feel dehumanized as an asexual person, a disabled person, or a neurodivergent person. I’ve never written a story where the lens was so clearly neurodivergent as this novel. To some degree, that’s because in public school and then college, every writing class taught me, “Write neurotypical people.” “Your psychology is unbelievable.”

A lot of my work after that was learning how to try to express my truths in ways that teachers had taught me not to. And a lot of the fiction that I absorbed, the stuff that was most meaningful to me, were these alternative perspectives, like John Gardner’s Grendel, or how Madeline Miller brings beautiful internal life to Circe. Martha Wells’ Murderbot also comes from a very flagrant neurodivergent perspective. It’s funny and lovable, and also is a proof of concept that a neurodivergent protagonist or lens does not mean that quote-unquote “normal” readers can’t get it, enjoy it, or love it. So a lot of my life has been what you’d call unlearning — absorbing wonderful writers, and then feeling like they gave me permission to try to be a little bit more of myself.

Every story I wrote along the way was finding different ways to express what being human has been like for me, through the inhuman. I couldn’t have written this book when I was 20 or even 30. I had to live this long and work like this to get at Shesheshen from the angle I did. I’m so glad I found her, because it was a liberating experience to meet her in the fictional space.

What grabbed me most about this book was the in-depth way you describe Shesheshen’s relationship with her body, whether she’s assembling a skeleton out of found objects, discarding unwanted parts of herself, or obsessing over parts of her body she can’t completely control. What were you focusing on in the language around her shape-shifting and her physicality?

That was something I thought about a lot! I’ve always liked shape-shifters. I’ve got a big soft spot for Mystique in the X-Men comics. And the notion of shape-shifters is often the notion of passing, which is a very queer, very disabled experience as well, trying to seem like everyone else, making your disabilities invisible. In fantastic literature, you can talk about that in a more direct, physical, tactile sense. So to one degree, it was very familiar: Shape-shifters just do this. But then I was like, Let’s make it difficult for her, let’s have challenges, in the way presenting a disabled body gets.

I have many disabilities, and go to great lengths to try to make them seem invisible. It’s funny how people often describe this as, “Oh, you have an invisible disability!” Which usually actually means, “Oh, you do the work so nobody will notice.” Shesheshen is constantly doing that work, presenting a disabled-coded and sometimes literally disabled body as what other people want it to be, so she can be what she wants.

What’s great about her experience of her body — she’s not at all ashamed of it. This would be gross if it was from somebody else’s perspective. Usually, if you look different in a story — certainly if you’re, like, a shape-shifting mass of meat on the floor — you’re supposed to be something horrible. But to her, just like to anyone who’s been disabled for even a couple of years, that’s just normal. This is what I live with. It’s not terrifying.

Sometimes it’s annoying. Sometimes you’re like, Oh, I really hope there isn’t a new development. I have had enough complications. And Shesheshen runs into that, like, Could it not be more complicated today, please? But otherwise, everything that might be horrifying or body horror about the book is, for her, just normal. And it’s part of an effort to try to make people feel like, You know what? However you look, however you are, whatever your body does, is normal for you. Which has a certain beauty. Even if it doesn’t have dignity, it doesn’t need to — it just has to have normality for you.

All the bios alongside your work do start with “John Wiswell is a disabled writer.” Why is that the first thing you want people to know about you?

It’s funny, in my bios, I will either always lead with “is a queer writer” or “is a disabled writer.” At first, I didn’t do that. And then when I started to get more readers, when my short fiction started to take off — “Open House on Haunted Hill” went viral. Now more people see me, and that means more disabled writers and disabled readers see me, and I want them to feel less alone. So the second a disabled writer — or a disabled emerging writer, because it took me many years to get published — [reads about me], I want them to know disabled people are in publishing, and we’re rooting for them.

Photo: Nicholas Sabin

They can succeed. You can succeed. We’re inside, really rooting for you. So it’s particularly important for me — I’m also asexual and aromantic, and we’ll try to put that into bios or interviews, so people know they do belong in here. You might not know that anybody has gotten in.

So often, the first line of my bio will be something like “John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps its trees.” That is in part to be like, the identity you think can’t belong does belong, to some degree. It’s also like, I’m just a funny, strange man who lives in the woods. I am not a disabled sob story. I’m a disabled person who has weird, creative ideas. And probably you do too! I’m really glad to meet you!

There’s so much conflict and controversy around the language of ableism, and some people object to the word “disabled.” Why is that the right word for you?

For many years, it wasn’t. I called myself “chronically ill,” as though that was a useful difference. And then there was a movement a little over a decade ago called the #SayTheWord movement, which was so many disabled people with different disabilities saying, “We all belong under the same umbrella. This is a word that has some shame, but we reject shame. And we want everybody to know that just like ‘LGBTQ’ or ‘queer’ exist as umbrellas for queer identities, ‘disabled’ exists as an umbrella for people of all different disabilities.” We often think of wheelchair users as disabled. Well, a blind person is also disabled. Neurodivergent people experience ableism within society. And we all benefit from being in a community together, where we can support each other, whether it’s in legal action for rights, or just in community help.

Like, I have a friend down the road who has Parkinson’s, and I’m an emergency contact for him. If anything happens, I will get over there and give him a hand. I don’t have Parkinson’s, and he doesn’t have the lung issues or the chronic pain issues I have. So if something went wrong, he’s an emergency contact for me, he would help me out. So especially in the last decade, “disabled” has become increasingly frequently the catch term, and I’m happy to participate with that. Also, I’m like a Pokémon trainer of disabilities, I’ve gotta catch them all. So I wouldn’t be like, “He is an author with mobility issues, and chronic pain, and defective lungs, and neurocognitive issues…” At that point, I’ve run out of word count in the bio anyway. [laughs]

Someone You Can Build a Nest In features a lot of metaphor around disability and bodily betrayal, but it also layers a lot of imagery and ideas around family trauma and abuse. How did you approach that aspect of the story?

It was a surprise to me, as Homily expanded, as her context expanded. Shesheshen has her own traumas from basically living in a survival state for almost her entire life. Homily has other issues, with her sisters, her brother, and of course, her mother, who defines the playing field. Homily has tried to become something they aren’t, and that they didn’t want her to be. She’s trying to have a gentleness and a generosity that they tried to train out of her. So she would be at odds with them, which meant for me, Shesheshen was going to learn more about Homily by meeting the people who helped form her, and avoiding putting them into direct conflict.

In that, you can see how a queer partner sometimes helps you navigate the power your blood family has over you, which is invaluable. Not just in queer romantic relationships, but — queer found family often isn’t just a sounding board. We, like, go to Thanksgiving with you, just so somebody has your back. It is a beautiful gift to give someone. I’ve done it a few times. Though not for Thanksgiving. If I’ve come to your Thanksgiving, trust me, I liked y’all very much, and I wasn’t trying to cause any trouble!

But [there can be] that kind of support in the face of traumas that still have influence over you as you’re growing, and adding dimensions to yourself that people in your past say can’t be there, that you were more then and you have grown to be even more now, regardless of how people identified you at one point.

And then there’s this central conflict in Homily: What is the person she wants to be, versus what she’s compelled to be? I tried to give as much space in the book to do justice to that as I could. And the critical reception so far has been really overwhelming and wonderful. To see how much it’s touched people — it’s everything I could have asked for, honestly, that this has made people feel less alone in how they’ve been hurt.

On top of everything else, there’s just the metaphorical value of wanting to lay eggs in a partner. It taps into that anxiety so many of us have about parasitic wasps. But it’s also a really good metaphor for overly possessive, colonizing, or destructive love. Do you remember where that idea first came from? Were you drawing on the insect world, or something else?

I do love ecology and biology, and I love finding out things about new animals. If you have a new slime-mold fact for me, I’m very interested! If you’ve found a new species of shark I’ve never heard of, I’ll be very excited. And so to some degree — I knew both real-world biology, and then the long history of fantasy creatures who do strange things. I grew up with Ridley Scott’s Alien, which is the ultimate problematic boyfriend. “I’m a hugger!” “No, I’m good, I’m good!”

At the same time, I knew that the book was going to play with Shesheshen thinking she was allosexual, and realizing she was asexual over the course of her journey. So I wanted to put her deeply at odds with what she thought she wanted, or what she was supposed to want, in a partner. Because I myself am asexual, and a lot of us asexual people grow up with expectations: At some point, it will click and I will want this. You subscribe to a narrative of, I will find the monogamous partner, and we will have 2.5 kids, and we will have a picket fence. It can be very hard when it hits that you don’t want that, and in fact that trying to fool yourself into it, you are not just hurting yourself, you’re potentially hurting somebody else.

That comes through as Shesheshen is gradually realizing what [her romance] would do to Homily, really. And then there’s her relationship to her father: The first page is her idolizing, “My dad was so great. He let me eat him from the inside out. I just loved him. He was a great guy. I can’t wait to meet someone like him someday, and murder them with my young.” Which is an explosive metaphorical notion about realizing that a narrative you had — in her case, a narrative she’s basically constructed out of scraps, from having never met either of her parents — a narrative can have power over you. But then there’s a power of shedding it and realizing what you really want underneath, what you didn’t let yourself understand.

John Wiswell is on tour in support of Someone You Can Build A Nest In throughout the summer. For dates and cities, check his blog page here.

Someone You Can Build A Nest In

Prices taken at time of publishing.

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she’s fallen in love. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.