I’ve reviewed and enjoyed a couple of John Wiswell’s Hugo-nominated stories, but this is his debut novel. And wow, what a debut. In this fairy-tale-but-not-really, a monster who’s been terrorizing a small town meets a kindhearted traveler who’s entire family is monstrous, and somehow each of them are exactly what the other one needs.
…her innards squeezed those rods and stones, aligning them into a loose skeletal structure. A steel chain once used to bind her now made an excellent spinal column, flexible without breaking when catapults lobbed debris at her.
You need to be prepared for a little body horror in this story. And by a little, I mean a lot. Most of the book, actually. Wiswell starts right in with the grotesquery as our main character, Shesheshen, wakes up from dreams of her happy childhood in the guts of her father, and the memory of the feast when she ate all of her siblings before they could eat her. It’s never said exactly what kind of monster Shesheshen is; the nearby townspeople call her wyrm, but what she actually looks like is a shapeshifting puddle of flesh. With no bones of her own, she’s adapted to absorb other things to make an upright shape. Wiswell absolutely glories in detailed descriptions of the wet, gloppy, utterly inhuman process as Shesheshen sucks in and morphs around things like metal scraps, sheep bones, a strategically-placed bear trap. And later on, a human jawbone, human blood, and other human items taken after a battle with monster-hunters who should have known better than to wake her up early from hibernation.
It felt good to have some kidneys and a pancreas inside her again.
Shesheshen is a truly nightmarish creature, and the reader is treated to all kinds of unsettling images as she battles trespassers, absorbs organs, and eats anything she doesn’t currently need. A poison crossbow bolt and a badly-timed visit to the nearby town of Underlook results in Shesheshen having to flee for her life from a torch and pitchfork mob right over the edge of a ravine, falling to her certain death…
…only to wake up safe and cozy and bandaged. She’d been rescued by a plump and pleasant woman named Homily, who’d helped what she thought was a woman that had been badly hurt in a fall, because Homily is made of pure niceness and that’s what you do when you find someone who needs help. Homily insists on taking Shesheshen back to Underlook in order to recuperate, and Shesheshen finds herself in the awkward position of pretending to be a human because a) the entire town wants the local monster dead and b) she doesn’t want to disappoint Homily, who happens to be the most shockingly positive and nurturing person in existence. And then she has to figure out why the townspeople are shying away from her rescuer since it’s obvious that this hurts Homily, and doing whatever she can to keep Homily from hurting has become very important.
For a shapeshifting monster that eats people and who’s natural form looks like something from the bowels of hell, Shesheshen is very judgey about human society. Hilariously so. Her total cluelessness about civilization means Wiswell can make some deliciously pithy commentary about all the things people have done from the beginning of time that someone on the outside might think are just wrong. Things like prejudice, or upper-class abuses, or wearing the skin or hair of an animal while you’re eating its flesh, I mean that’s just barbaric and rude.
I really love how Wiswell keeps making Shesheshen so appealing. Her sense of fairness means she enjoys eating humans who are trying to extort vulnerable humans (at least a couple of town sheriffs have met their end this way). She threatens one of the local townsfolk with the most gruesome fate imaginable in order to make him her flunky, and she finds his reaction to the threats both useful and really irritating. Best of all, the fact that she doesn’t know how to tell polite lies means she keeps saying the right things to Homily by sheer accident.
“What is wrong?”
“Can we not talk about it right now?”
“Yes. I love not talking.”
Homily gave a winsome crack of a smile. There was almost a laugh.
A supportive friend who makes you laugh is exactly what Homily needs, since it turns out that Homily’s family is hunting a monster that cursed them years ago. Bad luck, the monster turns out to be Shesheshen. Shesheshen has no idea about any curse, but she now has to help Homily in her monster hunt, because Homily’s family is the most terrible thing that ever happened to Homily, and every day it gets worse.
“Your family shouldn’t have built a household out of your pain.”
Should I add a trigger warning here for abuse? I probably should; Homily’s family situation is intensely awful, and it involves a wide spectrum of emotional and physical abuse, everything except sexual (I don’t think). To start off with, you’ve got a wealthy family with a lot of political power and the will to make everyone’s lives miserable as they take everything they want. You have a narcissistic, horrible-tempered, mother who demands total obedience, isolating her children from potential friends and lovers, playing one against the other to make sure they don’t have any allies, and then gaslighting them into believing that any reaction is wrong (“That’s right, make this about yourself, like you always do.”) There are several flavors of warped personality that Homily’s mother has twisted her siblings into. And let’s not forget there’s Homily’s ongoing trauma of being told that she’s worthless and a failure and that everything is her fault, by a mother who doesn’t actually want success, she just wants a target and a tool.
Wiswell has tapped into some primal emotions here, and even includes the damage that spirals out and affects the people who realize that everything they love about the victim was shaped by abuse that never should have happened.
Shesheshen wrapped her arms around Homily and held her to her chest for a moment, mourning the realization that she’d fallen in love with someone’s pain.
The lies that Shesheshen has to tell to hide her identity are harder and harder for her to stomach as she copes with the fact that loving Homily means she wants to save her from her family and live with her forever. But at the same time she also wants to plant eggs in her so her offspring can eat her alive from the inside, and the author packs in a lot of real romance and misery into those conflicting desires. Things only gets more and more horrifying as the monster hunt ramps up, the body count gets terrifyingly high, all the lies and several layers of betrayal pile up on each other, and suddenly everyone’s having to run from a grey wall of flesh that uses multiple deer skulls to scream at its prey.
This is a true gothic horror novel, but I was surprised to realize it’s got elements of something else: cozy fantasy. Yes, I know, gruesome body horror, death, familial abuse, it’s all in there, but hear me out. The growing relationship between Homily and Shesheshen is warm and sweet. It’s two people who are so unsure that they deserve happiness that they’re both still discovering what happiness means. What affection looks like between two women who have different needs and don’t worry about what they’re supposed to need. The story of a monster hunt and horrific family members is almost less important than the story of overcoming trauma and building a found family, with a generous sprinkling of comfort soup and cuddling and a food fight where Homily and Shesheshen mock-angrily chew food at each other. This book also has the best ending; I really admire when an author has the bravery to wrap up an entire story in a single perfect word.