Book Recommendation

How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster)

by Marie Cardno — find her on Twitter and Instagram

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How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster) by Marie Cardno advertises itself as a cozy fantasy romance between a scientist-witch and an eldritch horror (both of whom use she/her pronouns). It's also the first installment of a duology!

Our story opens with Trillin, the eldritch horror, gaining consciousness as she finds herself separated from the predatory Cthulhian entity known as the Endless in the dimension where they live. She is now capable of having an individual personality as well as wants and desires, and one of the first things she sees upon awakening is Sian, the scientist-witch who has entered the Endless' dimension to study its inhabitants. (Trillin figures out her individual wants and desires pretty quickly after Sian shows up).

It's adorably weird—Cardno doesn't shy away from the body horror and describes more ever-multiplying teeth and eyeballs than any human is normally comfortable with, but Trillin is, if you will believe this, shy. She has very little life experience that is 100% hers (although she possesses hazy memories of everything the Endless has experienced, since she broke off from it) and when she meets Sian for the first time she freezes up and afterwards feels incredibly embarrassed. Imagine a teenage girl trying to talk to her crush, except the teenage girl in question has over a dozen eyeballs and lots of tentacles and cilia and is generally terrifying to look at.

Cardno is a master of the creepy cute school of creature design. Trillin is horrifying to behold, but she's also adorable and sweet. Likewise, Sian rescues a cat-rabbit-bug-thing that is described as follows:

Trillin stared at the [creature]. It was tiny, and fluffy, and had made itself six tentative legs and two furry antennae on top of its head. It had one eye, then three, and settled on six.

Don't you just wanna go awwww and pet it?

This is a weird book, but it's also sweet enough to induce dental problems. In some ways the prose reminds me of Terry Pratchett's writing style for the Discworld series, but with a bouncier and more happy-go-lucky edge; as a cozy fantasy romance, the reader and author both know that the stakes are lower here. Cardno maintains wit and humor throughout her novella—this really is a good book to curl up with when you want something safe, warm, weird, and funny all at once.

Sian herself is a great character as well. She's big and buff but also unashamedly nerdy, and very tenacious, optimistic, and caring. It takes a very special kind of person to say nice tentacles to an eldritch horror as soon as you hop through a portal into a dimension that no other human researcher has ever returned alive from, but Sian makes it work. She's hysterically funny and quite probably insane, and her growing feelings for Trillin are so cute.

This novella comes in at just over a hundred pages and is a treat all around. Trillin, Sian, and their new pet get into some amazing hijinks to stay alive as the Endless tries to hunt them down and absorb them into its mass, and I devoured the story in just about a single sitting. Overall, I would definitely recommend this to anyone in the mood for some tentacle-y sapphic sweetness.

Find this book on Amazon Kindle.

Have you read How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster)? Do you want to? If you have any questions or thoughts about the book, feel free to leave a comment in the box down below!