Someone You Can Build a Nest In

Someone You Can Build a Nest In participates in a postmodern literary tradition that seeks to humanize monstrous figures by narrating stories from their perspective. John Gardner’s 1971 novel Grendel, which retells the epic poem Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, famously uses this approach. Like Gardner, John Wiswell centers the consciousness of the so-called monster in his novel and challenges traditional binaries between hero and monster, and civilization and savagery. Shesheshen, a shapeshifting creature driven by instinct and longing, becomes a vehicle for questioning what it means to be human, or to be deemed human.

Wiswell’s literary choice recalls Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which positioned the Creature as a thoughtful, articulate being whose monstrosity arises from society’s rejection of his differences rather than from his nature itself. This echoes Someone You Can Build a Nest In’s theme of Monstrosity as a Social Construct Rather Than an Innate Trait. Like the Creature, Shesheshen is shaped by her loneliness and the moral hypocrisy of those who