(I mean. Obviously the text also has an enormous quantity of strangeness due to being a queer fantasy romance where people can shapeshift and survive fatal wounds, lol. But I want it to feel just a bit not-at-home-in-English, too.)

What a fascinating problem for anyone wanting to translate the novel into French (me!). Would you prefer “comme un taureau dans un magasin de porcelaine“ then? That’d make sense to me to conserve the strangeness