We chat with debut author John Wiswell about Someone You Can Build A Nest In, which is a creepy and charming monster-slaying sapphic romance for fans of Gideon The Ninth and Circe.
Hi, John! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m a disabled human who lives where New York keeps all its trees. I’ve always related to monsters, be they Murderbot or Godzilla or Piccolo or the t-rex in Jurassic Park. I have a lifelong love of storytelling, and while this is my first published novel, I’ve been publishing short fiction for about fifteen years now. I’ve won a couple of awards and been translated into ten languages. Besides reading, I am unhealthily excited by history, scary movies, videogames, and pro wrestling (Kenta Kobashi is the GOAT). I am allergic to basically all pets, but if I had my choice, I would love a little shark on legs.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
When I was young, I became very ill and couldn’t walk much. The illness filled my nights with pain, and often the only thing that got me through the night was reading a compelling book. It was the desire to find out what happened on the next page. Authors like Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Michael Crichton were a lifeline for me. I’d enjoyed stories beforehand, but in that period I truly fell in love with the power of storytelling. As I learned to walk again, one of the things I pushed for was to study writing so that I could do for others what those authors had done for me.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The first book I recall taking off a shelf was just called PLESIOSAURS. It was an entire book just about plesiosaurs, which blew my mind. Could you believe a whole book existed just about them? I was tiny, and fascinated by the illustrations, especially the one of them using their flippers to climb onto land. I’d never thought about aquatic critters coming up onto the beaches. I have never found that book again as an adult, but it kickstarted my desire to yank every odd book off the shelves.
- The one that made you want to become an author: There was something about Stephen King’s The Wasteland, which probed his Dark Tower world and made it even weirder, and bent so many conventions. It made storytelling feel more tactile to me. Like it wasn’t just something to learn, but something to play with, and to experiment with. Not only did I love that book, but it left me feeling like I could grow if I pushed myself. Growing as writers always starts with pushing a boundary.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: I think about Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty all the time. An Epic Fantasy where he treated the world as the main character, and so it got the most development. It wrestles with so many philosophical questions, and every answer just makes conflicts harder to resolve and wipe away. Those books have more of the truth of history than many history books.
Your debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Monstrous. Sympathetic. Funny. Affectionate. Carnivorous.
What can readers expect?
Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster who lurks on her isthmus, living reclusively and avoiding monster hunters. After being badly injured and poisoned, she’s rescued by a kindly human named Homily, who mistakes Shesheshen for a fellow human and nurses her back to health. The more time they spend together, the closer the two get. Shesheshen never thought love was possible with a human, but that same love makes it harder for Shesheshen to hide her secret. She’s about to confess when Homily reveals why she’s in the isthmus: she’s hunting a horrible shapeshifting monster. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?
So far critics have called it funny, gory, sweet, Cozy Horror, Cozy Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Romantasy, Romance, Body Horror, and Comedy. So you can expect a wide range of things! But mostly you can expect a very sympathetic monster in a wide and complex world.
Where did the inspiration for Someone You Can Build a Nest In come from?
I have always liked monsters and villains in stories. Some of them are inherently charismatic or have neat designs, but in most cases they fill odd roles in their worlds. What do xenomorphs do when no humans have landed on their planet? What is a slow summer like for a banshee? So I wanted to play with a long form story about the internal life and growth of a monster. But more than that: I wanted to explore her search for companionship and joy. The notion of this typically terrifying creature desperately trying not to blow it with a cute girl from out of town was too fun. Every scene I played with wound up expanding and suggesting more context, and more ways the two of them could grow. It had to be a novel to do them justice.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Homily and Shesheshen’s first meeting was a weird delight. It was one of those times when Shesheshen was so overwhelmed she misunderstood everything, and so she thought she was trapped in a net when she was actually wrapped up in a blanket. Her fury at being taken care of when she was sick was both so funny and so relatable. Then over the course of the novel, every time Shesheshen and Homily’s relationship expanded and one spurred the other to grow? That keep me stuck to my keyboard, to keep it going. Without spoiling it, when some of the bigger revelations happened, they turned out more dramatic and resonant than I’d ever planned. But I was sweating for them both!
This is your debut published novel! What was the road to publishing like for you?
A long and winding one! I have been publishing short fiction for fifteen years now. It was a slow boil of a career, one really weird story after another, then some breaking big or even going viral. “Open House on Haunted Hill,” about a lonely haunted house that promises to behave if someone will just live in it, felt like my “coming of age” as an author. That story won the Nebula and was nominated for so many other awards. I still dearly love short fiction and keep writing it; I have six or seven new shorts coming later this year. But the whole time, I was writing novels on the side, honing my craft. To some extent my short fiction was also proving that there was an audience for my strange, warmhearted brand of storytelling. Many agents and editors told me that sort of stuff just didn’t sell. But Hannah Bowman believed in me. She is my agent now. She rejected my prior two books but saw power in them and kept offering to see the next thing. This book here? This was the next thing. Hannah is so wise and helped shape the book to go on submission, where it wound up gathering a lot of attention and going to auction. Editor Katie Hoffman and DAW Books came out of nowhere to win it, and have done a wonderful job championing this disabled, queer, monstrous book. Many days it still doesn’t feel real! I try to remind other authors who are struggling because they’re different to keep believing in themselves.
What’s next for you?
So I can’t announce what it’s about yet, but I’m writing another novel for DAW Books. It’s about new characters and a different world, but it shares strong thematic ties to Someone You Can Build A Nest In. It’s another angle on finding kinship with monsters. Where Someone You Can Build A Nest In is principally a novel about our bodies and how we use them to our personalities, this next novel is about voices and how they express more about us than we realize. I’m excited for folks to see it!
Lastly, are there any book releases that you’re looking forward to picking up this year?
So right now I have Kelly Link’s The Book of Love sitting on my desk at home, waiting for me the second I have free time. She’s one of my favorite living short story writers and I am so psyched to see what a novel from her looks like.
Among books that aren’t out yet, M.H. Ayinde’s A Song of Legends Lost sounds like an amazing epic. Eden Royce’s Psychopomp and Circumstance digging into the horror-vibes of the U.S. Reconstruction era should be dynamite.
Some that crash to mind are Julie Leong’s Teller of Small Fortunes, Samantha Mills’s The Wings Upon Her Back (Sam just won basically all the awards last year for her short story “Rabbit Test”), Jules Arbeaux’s Lord of the Empty Isles, R.S.A Garcia’s The Nightward, and (also on the theme of nights!) Hildur Knútsdóttir’s The Night Guest. It’s such an amazing year for new fiction.
