Someone You Can Build a Nest In: why I'm skeptical of cozy horror
I want to use Someone You Can Build a Nest In as a sort of case study to talk about cozy fiction. I am admittedly a bit late to the party. Cozy fiction is not a particularly new trend. Most readers I know first encountered it in 2020 during quarantine, but it actually predates the pandemic. Solarpunk has existed explicitly since 2012, and Iyashikei has been around since the seventies. However, in recent years, efforts have been made to more strictly define cozy literature. Of course, no one can fully agree on a definition, and I'm not going to even try to come up with my own. All I'll say is that what you can usually expect from cozy books is for the story to be low in stakes and high in slice of life.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by most definitions, is not a cozy book, not really. It deals with too many dark topics like abuse and animal cruelty, and the stakes are high. At the same time, it's clearly drawing heavily from the cozy trend. You follow Shesheshen, a monster in a high fantasy world. Living on the margins of society, Shesheshen encounters hostility and fear from the surrounding world while also discovering friendship and love. It's basically a book for all the quirky queer kids in need of some positive affirmation, and I totally understand the appeal, but I also have some criticisms. The characterization is inconsistent, the plot could be tighter, and the writing is a little unsubtle. It's also overly sanitized. To survive, Shesheshen eats humans, which might make you think this book is the opposite of sanitized. You'd be wrong. The narrative carefully restricts Shesheshen's victims to individuals coded as unquestionably evil. There's no time to wonder whether these humans are truly evil or just acting out of desperation. There's no genuine exploration into the possibility of rehabilitating evil people, and when it is raised as an option, it's proven not to be effective. The world is split very simply down the middle into good and bad, and even though the human characters sometimes mix the two up due to various personal biases, Shesheshen can see through it all. Readers can too. Shesheshen, because she eats the villains, gets to sit firmly on the side of the good guys.
The reality is that for Shesheshen to stay alive, either terrible criminals need to continue to exist or she needs to commit her own atrocities, which raises a whole host of moral questions, all of which are swept under the rug in favor of making Shesheshen into an unambiguous, if misunderstood, hero. Whenever she gets hungry for human flesh, murderers and other irredeemable antagonists appear at just the right moments to ensure that our protagonist gets to kill only in self-defense. The conveniently manufactured appearance of disposable humans is a narrative strategy that reflects a broader tendency within certain strands of cozy fiction: the elimination of ambiguity in favor of emotional safety. Conflicts exist, but they rarely demand genuine compromise. Harm occurs, but readers are seldom forced to confront it directly, unless it befalls characters already marked as deserving of their fate. The protagonists get to remain sympathetic without confronting the darker implications of their actions.
In genres like fantasy or romance, this approach may simply produce a cute story. In the context of horror, however, it feels incongruous. The concept of emotional safety is a bit at odds with the horror genre, so when Someone You Can Build a Nest In draws so heavily from cozy fantasy, the story suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a horror novel? Is it a cozy novel? (I know genre can sometimes be an arbitrary label, but bear with me for a second.) Most bookstores and libraries shelve Someone You Can Build a Nest In as fantasy. Goodreads has it tagged as fantasy first, horror second, and romance third. Storygraph marks it as fiction, fantasy, horror, lgbtqia+, and romance. In my mind, there's no question that Someone You Can Build a Nest In is best described as a fantasy horror novel with a very prevalent subplot involving a cozy romance. However you shake things, horror and cozy elements are both trying to coexist in the same fantasy story, and it doesn't really work here. It highlights why people on Tumblr used to have debates about whether cozy horror is a coherent subgenre at all.
Horror traditionally derives its power from the confrontation with the unacceptable: the monstrous, the taboo, the immoral, and the repressed. It asks readers to sit with unease. When those tensions are consistently diffused and resolved, the genre's defining emotional experiences disappear. What you're left with is something that has the aesthetics of horror, but none of the substance. Everything is decorated to look scary, so there might be monsters, bats, haunted houses, ghosts, skeletons, witches, mummies, spiderwebs, and ghouls, but you're promised that none of it is designed to hurt you. It's intended to be safe, which is totally fine on the face of things. In general, it's okay to defang monsters to make them more palatable. It's theoretically a good way to take a small step outside your comfort zone, and even if it's not, the domestication of fear can be enjoyable or even soothing. I have no desire to eliminate cozy horror from existence. However, for me, the decision to defang monsters also raises fundamental questions about whether those fangs were really such big a problem in the first place.
When it comes to horror literature, monsters and their fangs are rarely meant to be taken literally. Broadly speaking, monsters tend to fall into several overlapping symbolic categories. First, they may represent harmful forces: patriarchy, abuse, authoritarianism, or exploitation. Second, they may represent stigmatized groups: outsiders, foreigners, incarcerated individuals, or others who have been historically cast as threatening. Third, monsters may simply embody some more universal fear or nightmare, serving as a vehicle through which audiences can process disturbing experiences such as violence or mortality. These categories are neither exhaustive nor fixed. Many monsters occupy ambiguous territory in between, and the point of horror is not always to deliver a clear answer about how patriarchy is bad, foreigners are good, and torture is grotesque. The point really is to examine, interact with, and work through troubling topics from a lot of different angles.
I'm not saying that horror always is or has to be allegorical. It just often is, and Someone You Can Build a Nest In is no exception. It's not a stretch to say that Shesheshen is meant to represent marginalized identities. In fact, it would be more of a stretch to say she doesn't. She is explicitly queer, and she's coded as disabled. You don't have to read between the lines to see it. It's not intended to be subtle. Shesheshen exists outside social norms, is feared and hunted by the majority, and must navigate a world structured against her survival. It's a classic setup for an allegory about otherness. However, by softening her predatory nature, the narrative transforms its allegory into something more palatable for a presumed normative audience. The monster is acceptable, heroic even, because she has been stripped of anything nefarious that might disturb readers. It raises the question: disturbing to whom?
See, if an author decides to write about fundamentally good people, then the book actually kind of makes an implicit moral claim about what counts as fundamental goodness. Normally we can all agree roughly on what a good person looks like. Sometimes, however, an author's moral framework might have blind spots. They might not always think through the implications of their characters' actions, or they may simply want to avoid the more complicated and troubling questions, especially if the book is intended to be charming, simple, and wholesome. Either way, there are underlying ideologies driving any cozy story (as is the case for all works of art, but I'll save that discussion for another time), which isn't inherently a problem. What does concern me sometimes is that these ideologies are meant to go unquestioned. Cozy fiction is designed to be soothing, unchallenging, and compulsively readable. It's often consumed more passively than other types of books. While I firmly believe that all stories are capable of being read critically, some books demand that kind of reading more than others. Some books can't be fully understood at all without a close reading. Cozy fiction, on the other hand, very often doesn't demand anything at all, which is part of its appeal, but without a critical or close reading, these books end up inundating readers with a bunch of unexamined claims about what it looks like to be fundamentally good and unproblematic. What happens when those claims are actually knottier than they might seem on the surface?
Returning to Shesheshen, I can't help but notice that she is constructed to be just human enough to fit within the bounds of respectability and acceptability for the average reader, so it might be helpful to know who gets to define those boundaries. Who is this average reader?
If it's not obvious already, then I'll just say it explicitly: I don't think queer disabled people are the ones who get to define the boundaries of acceptability. Shesheshen feels a little assimilated to me, and Someone You Can Build a Nest In has a tendency to water down what it's like to be othered, making the experience appear less messy, more sanitized, and easier to swallow than it usually is.
The book's allegory gestures towards queer and disabled experiences, so the decision to defang the monster begins to resemble a demand that marginalized people render themselves less disruptive in order to be tolerated. The narrative's central subversion -- that the monster is not truly monstrous and that society is the real villain all along (which isn't that subversive if you've read horror before, but there's only so much you can do with the nonhuman-protagonist trope) -- ultimately depends on a definition of villainy that goes unquestioned. The boundaries of normalcy, acceptability, and villainy are, at best, expanded. They're not removed.
A more radical story would allow the monster to be monstrous. Rather than reassuring readers that difference can still conform close to existing norms, horror stories can push against those standards of normalcy to expose their instability. They can force audiences to repeatedly cross the boundaries between self and other, life and death, pure and impure, and more, revealing that the borders we draw around identity, morality, and social belonging are neither natural nor permanent. They are constructed, threatened, and defended. A book about a monster like Shesheshen does not need to merely answer whether she is safe or unsafe. It can instead raise the unsettling possibility that the categories we take for granted to differentiate between safe and unsafe may themselves be fragile and fluid. (Fans of Julia Kristeva would probably approve of this approach.)
Someone You Can Build a Nest In opts for something else. It's trying to be wholesome, drawing heavily from cozy fantasy, but it can't really commit, and I'm not convinced that it should have even bothered to try. It features a whole lot of darkness, but it's oddly inconsistent about when it chooses to be provocative and when it doesn't. The result is that cozy trends are shoehorned in. Many atrocities occur throughout the book, but notably, Shesheshen is never the one responsible. The most ignoble thing she does is lie to her love interest. (Well, personally, I didn't find it particularly noble when she killed bandits for food, because I don't automatically believe criminals are inherently irredeemable, but the act is presented as a heroic one.) Most of what she does is framed as entirely sympathetic, relying on a definition of sympathy that is, of course, tangled up in an ideology that goes unexamined. Instead of examining and unsettling these definitions and the ideologies they prop up, the book plays it safe. It's unambitious. It has horror, so it does unsettle some boundaries, particularly those around the idea of the innocent child versus the wicked abuser, but it leaves others inexplicably untouched. In a book about what it means to be othered by an entire civilization, you might hope that definitions of civilized and uncivilized might be challenged more comprehensively. What you get instead is a trite reveal that Shesheshen is actually the civilized one. She conforms to a preexisting definition of civilized that doesn't get meaningfully deconstructed.
It might be useful at this point to compare Someone You Can Build a Nest In to one of my favorite horror books of all time: Walking Practice by Dolki Min. Walking Practice features a marginalized nonhuman protagonist, an alien named Mumu, who is attempting to survive within human society. Like Shesheshen, Mumu is meant to be read as queer and disabled. Unlike Shesheshen, the narrative refuses to sanitize the darker implications of the characters' predatory nature. Mumu remains alien from start to finish, and their actions are always ethically unsettling. Rather than resolving these tensions neatly, the story allows them to persist. It treats otherness as legitimately complex rather than easily assimilable. Walking Practice is thus an exploration of marginalization and alienation; Someone You Can Build a Nest In, on the other hand, is a familiar and reassuring moral lesson, claiming that difference is acceptable, provided it does not disrupt existing frameworks too severely.
Even readers who agree with the underlying moral frameworks beneath Shesheshen's story (as I, for the most part, do) can be disappointed by the fact that the horror elements aren't used to unsettle things a little bit. When all a story does is reaffirm our preexisting worldviews, it risks feeling less like explorations of difficult ideas and more like an unnecessary reassurance. It doesn't make for particularly groundbreaking or eye-opening literature, and at this point, I'm basically conjuring up longstanding debates about the function of cozy literature more broadly: does it have to be groundbreaking?
In my opinion, cozy fiction offers hope. Stories that foreground kindness, cooperation, found family, and emotional healing can be restorative, particularly in a world that is hostile or exhausting. The ability to step away from stress for a time is a kind of self-care. Cozy literature doesn't have to be groundbreaking to serve this purpose. In fact, it's better off being simple and familiar. The point is to offer readers a place to escape and retreat strategically from reality before getting back out there with a renewed strength, energy, and perspective.
What people do with this renewed energy is fully up to them. You might find it trite, but I always encourage people to dream big. Change the world. Engage in activism. Volunteer somewhere. Just find a small but meaningful way to be a better person, make a difference, and help others. I think the best cozy literature has the potential to motivate readers to try to make the world a better place. It can offer a blueprint for what a better place might look like. It can restore faith in humanity. It can portray an ideal that is worth fighting for. At the same time, I am also aware that the self-care industry sometimes encourages passivity. The promise of soothing escape can subtly discourage readers from engaging with the very problems that produced their desire for escapism in the first place. Self-care and escapism can be inspiring. They can also lull people into a sense of complacency.
It would, of course, be simplistic to claim that art must always serve an external purpose. Cozy fiction doesn't need to justify its own existence. It can just be something that people enjoy or derive meaning from, and they don't have to explain themselves. Just because the purpose may be illegible to me doesn't make it wrong. The idea that art (or anything) must produce a measurable social benefit can itself become restrictive. The emphasis on measurable production is probably tied to the capitalistic frameworks that are causing the majority of our problems to begin with. There's no easy answer for what art does, and there shouldn't be, but it is still possible to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously: readers are free to enjoy literature for its own sake, and we can still examine the cultural forces that shape and are shaped by trends. The cozy trend has produced a lot of books that are inspiring and healing. Their unchallenging nature can also inspire more complicity than the world probably needs right now. It really depends on the reader.
What then does horror do (if anything) for the open-minded reader? If cozy fiction offers one form of relief from a troubled world, does horror do something similar? I would say so. By encountering unsettling scenarios, readers can engage with their fears in a structured and technically safe environment. It accustoms us to being exposed to anything, which can combat our most isolating tendencies. Instead of walling ourselves away from everything that can hurt us, we sometimes need to face big problems, even if it means processing difficult emotions and truths. Horror is a way to practice processing and sitting with those difficult emotions. In a society increasingly defined by loneliness, isolation, and alienation, this function of horror may be incredibly valuable. When it's sanitized or watered down, however, horror loses some of its power.
I'm not saying that cozy horror is automatically impossible. Walking Practice is itself a little cozy. The tone is conversational, whimsical, and charming, and it serves its purpose. (I won't spoil what it is here. Just go read the book yourself.) I've also read stories that explore how communities might maintain tenderness when confronting the uncanny. These stories require balance. The horror has to remain genuinely unsettling. Comfort cannot fully displace dread.
Some of the most compelling stories, whether gentle or disturbing, invite readers to confront the world with renewed imagination rather than retreat from it indefinitely. I don't think Someone You Can Build a Nest In is one of those stories. I think it's cute and sweet, but its unambitious nature feels like a symptom of a broader trend where books are rewarded for being inoffensive, unchallenging, and unprovocative without fully interrogating who might have otherwise been offended, challenged, and provoked. Who are we trying to protect by keeping things lighthearted? In the case of Someone You Can Build a Nest In, I worry that by making the messy experience of being othered and marginalized seem more palatable than it so often is, the novel is prioritizing the sensibilities of readers who aren't queer or disabled, which seems counterproductive in a story like this one.