I Read a Smut Book About the Loch Ness Monster, and Now I’m Scared to Go in the Water

Every so often, a corner of BookTok surfaces something so unhinged that scrolling past it feels like a moral failing. This week, that something was The Loch Ness Monster by Siggy Shade, a 128 page paranormal romance in which a newly jilted bride rows out onto a Scottish loch and accidentally gives a cryptid a hand job.

I bought it. I read it in one sitting. I am, unfortunately, going to tell you everything.

dusk, Lexi hears a voice from the water and finds an old brass lamp bobbing in the loch. Genre savvy as she is, she strikes a deal for wishes, and gets talked down from three to two before she’s even pulled the thing out of the water.

The “genie” then asks her to rub it. Specifically the spout. Specifically with her fingers instead of a handkerchief. Lexi, somehow still not clocking the situation, obliges, right up until something warm and unmistakably not magical smoke hits her in the face.

The lamp was the Loch Ness Monster the entire time, and Lexi has just been catfished into what the book bluntly calls an unwitting monster hand job. He surfaces moments later, the size of a bus, offers his thanks with the line that he’d be happy to return the favour, and vanishes back into the water, taking her phone with him out of sheer mischief.

It’s a genuinely funny opening, and I mean that as a compliment. The comic timing of “I thought that was the Loch Ness Monster, ha ha” followed almost immediately by an actual cryptid hand job is better plotted than most sitcom cold opens.

Meet Your New Situationship: Argumentative, Extinct-Adjacent

The monster tracks Lexi down that same night, tapping on her window in full plesiosaur form to return her (now dry) phone. What follows is less a seduction than a very confident bit.

When Lexi calls him a monster, he corrects her with mild offence: he’s a plesiosaur. She fires back that he looks more like a diplodocus. He points out, not unreasonably, that diplodocuses are extinct. It’s the kind of exchange you’d expect from two people bickering at a dinner party, not from a woman being propositioned by a sea creature the size of a school bus, and that mismatch is exactly why it works.

He’s also, by his own admission, a shameless liar. He copped earlier to spinning her a line about her soul shining brighter than any other just to get her to touch the lamp, and when she calls him on it, he doesn’t even try to deny it. He just says touché.

A few things worth flagging for anyone considering this genre for the first time:

            •           He can shapeshift into objects as well as creatures, which is how the lamp trick worked in the first place.

            •           He can only hold any given form for a lunar month before he has to return to plesiosaur shape.

            •           His flirting style is roughly seventy percent filthy promises, thirty percent formal apology. It’s an odd combination and it somehow lands

         .•           His special juices taste like whisky because Scottish stereotypes or whatever.

Below is a screenshot of the author Siggy Shade’s TikTok:

The Slow Burn Bit (Loosely Speaking)

To be clear about what kind of book this is: the “slow burn” here is measured in pages, not chapters. Lexi spends most of the first half working through denial, insisting her body isn’t reacting to any of this, while the monster escalates from window visits to full merman form, complete with a tail that the narration treats less like a fish tail and more like a second, fully operational appendage.

The mechanics of his shapeshifting get more world building than you’d expect from a book with this premise. He explains that changing form is a matter of moving and compressing atoms rather than magic, and that whatever object or creature he becomes always looks identical each time, which is a surprisingly tidy way of explaining why he keeps returning to the same lamp and the same merman silhouette. He also has a sister, another shapeshifter, who turns out to be closer to home than Lexi expects.

Meanwhile, the human plot keeps grinding along in the background. Colin texts claiming he’s “fighting for his life,” which turns out to mean his rejection of Lexi went viral and he’s facing backlash, not that he’s actually dying. Lexi, understandably, is not moved.

Enter Mr. Wilson: The Bed and Breakfast’s Actual Twist

The book’s best structural trick is the elderly gentleman running Lexi’s bed and breakfast, Mr. Wilson, a kindly older man who keeps popping up with folksy comfort and suspiciously good timing. When a media circus descends on the property after Lexi’s story goes viral (more on that below), the stress reportedly triggers Mr. Wilson’s weak heart, and Lexi watches him apparently die in front of a crowd of reporters, performing CPR in a genuine panic.

It’s a fake out. Mr. Wilson and the monster are the same person. He’s been running the establishment under a rotating cast of “family members” for centuries, alongside his sister, the housekeeper Mrs. Smith, who is quietly revealed to be Nessie herself. Staging his own death lets him step aside as the elderly proprietor and reappear, a chapter later, as his own dashing grandson: Nestor Wilson, auburn haired, kilted, and finally introduced by name.

Is it a lot? Yes. Does the book commit to it with a completely straight face? Also yes, and that commitment is what makes it work as comedy even when it clearly isn’t trying to be one.

The Villains Get What’s Coming to Them

This is the section I suspect readers actually show up for. Colin and Denise, having caused Lexi nothing but grief, get caught drinking an entire pot of tea that Nessie brewed centuries ago as an anti plague remedy. Its active ingredient, revealed with a completely deadpan delivery, is Nestor’s own bodily fluid. One sip prevents disease. An entire pot, consumed greedily by two people who assumed the tea was free real estate, gives them both a face full of warts.

Lexi’s reaction to this reveal is somewhere between horror and deep satisfaction, and honestly, same. The warts are framed as karmic and temporary, receding over a few months, though the book notes that trying to remove them early leaves permanent scarring, which is exactly the kind of detail that suggests at least one of these characters is going to try anyway.

The Ending: Viral Fame, a Second Wedding, and a Tail Where You Least Expect It

Once the human form is confirmed and the identity reveal is out of the way, the book closes out its romance arc properly. Nestor explains the terms of his existence honestly this time: he can hold human shape for a lunar month before he has to return to the loch, he’s been betrayed by humans before, and he’s choosing to risk it again with Lexi specifically because of who she is under the humiliation Colin and Denise put her through.

There’s a genuinely charming beat where Lexi discovers that even in fully human form, some of his monster anatomy comes along for the ride, which the book treats with the same cheerful confidence as everything else. It’s the kind of detail that would read as absurd in isolation and somehow reads as consistent world building in context, which might be the single best thing I can say about this book’s craft.

By the epilogue, Lexi has leaned all the way into her viral fame, is fielding Netflix offers for her life story, and marries Nestor in a second, much better wedding at the same bed and breakfast where it all started. Colin, meanwhile, has lost his job, sold his house to repay Lexi’s parents, and is doing damage control from his childhood bedroom, wart scars and all. Denise has also lost her job and now makes a living posting wart removal content on YouTube, which is somehow both a punishment and a career pivot.

The Verdict

Here’s my honest read on why this book works better than it has any right to:

            •           The comic timing is genuinely good. The lamp reveal, the plesiosaur versus diplodocus argument, and the wart tea payoff are all better constructed jokes than the premise suggests they’ll be.

            •           The emotional throughline is more sincere than the premise implies. Lexi’s arc, from humiliated bride to a woman who trusts her own instincts again, is played completely straight, and it mostly earns its ending.

            •           The shapeshifting logic holds together. Say what you like about the concept, but the author clearly thought through the rules of the world and stuck to them, which counts for more than you’d expect.

            •           The author’s back catalogue is its own form of entertainment. A glance at “Also by Siggy Shade” turns up titles including a Bigfoot breeding romance and something called Tentacle Entanglement, so at minimum, this is not an author dabbling. This is a fully committed niche.

Would I recommend it? If you want a competent, self aware romance that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and refuses to blink, yes. If you’re after anything resembling realism, obviously not, but nobody picking up a book called The Loch Ness Monster was expecting a Booker Prize contender.

Some books make you laugh by accident. This one, somehow, on purpose.