And more allergies.

“Normal” looks different on everyone. This can be especially true if you happen to be a shapeshifter. Come along with author John Wiswell as he shows you what normality is for the main character of his newest novel, Someone You Can Build A Nest In, as well as a bit about what normal looks like for himself.

JOHN WISWELL:

How does a Fantasy adventure look from the point-of-view of the monster everyone wants to slay?

That’s something I’ve been thinking since I was a little kid. We all agree monsters are cool, right? We have art of them, read stories about them, and dress up as them for Halloween. You can only read so many stories about heroically killing off camps of vile goblins before you wonder. What was Medusa’s daily life like for all those years, before the day Perseus showed up with his sword and his destiny? Before Jonathan Harker visited, what was the emotional landscape of all the centuries inside Dracula’s dark castle?

To put it another way: what are the internal lives of all the creatures our stories pretend don’t have them? 

Because wherever we deny empathy and internal life, we usually find the most interesting stories have been hidden. Monsters are often repositories of those things society wishes didn’t exist—hence all the disability-coding in ogres and queer-coding in vampires. When you turn a monster over in your hands and look at the different angles, you often find things you relate to. The things that make you feel unwanted. Fantasy is a special genre for exploring those parts of our lives.

Also? Tentacles are awesome. Wings, spiked tails, and shells harder than iron. Just the idea of living in a body where that sort of thing is normal is interesting. Any life you live long enough is normal to you. As a disabled guy living in a body that has tried to kill me numerous times, I love learning other people’s normality.

As I wrote more of Someone You Can Build A Nest In, Shesheshen’s idea of ‘normal’ cast a spell on me. Being a shapeshifter doesn’t solve all of Shesheshen’s problems. She can take any form, but she has trouble generating bones and many kinds of organs. This means hunting around for things to build her body on top of. To some extent her shapeshifting is a superpower, but also, to her, bones are assistive devices. 

And none of it is weird. Some early reviewers questioned if this book was Body Horror because Shesheshen warps her body so frequently, but it’s never grotesque to her. No more than maintaining the glucose meter on your bicep or flushing out an abscess you’ve had for weeks. She messes with her body the way we all mess with ours. Her “Body Horror” is normalized rather than exoticized, the same way all many disabled people eventually find a degree of familiarity and normality. So from the first chapter, her experience is something closer to Body Fantasy, or Body Normality.

We’re not weirdos to ourselves; it’s other people who try to make us feel that way. Many of us internalize that and shame ourselves. But to Shesheshen, it’s the world who treats her as monstrous that is wrong. One of the key parts to writing her was to let her take pride in herself. When she succeeds at fooling her home invaders (humans call them “monster hunters”), that tickles her. That she can pull herself out of pain and brain fog to fight is affirming. And when she finds that special someone she might actually want to date? She picks out bones from the local butcher’s shop to design herself the best possible dancing feet. She tries on bones the way other people try on shoes and jackets. 

That’s the big idea: treating atypical bodies as typical, because they are typical to those of us who live with them. My body has been trying to kill me since I was twelve years old. This is my normal. 

Monstrous joy has to exist in a book about monstrous pain. That’s what Shesheshen is fighting for.

Well, that and some new leg bones.

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Out out, Mister Goofums. A fear submitted by Lauren to Deep Dark Fears - thanks!

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