The meet-cute that opens “Blob,” Maggie Su’s offbeat debut novel, takes place outside a gay bar called the Back Door. The narrator, Vi, has been a regular for months, as she tries to get over a breakup with her longtime boyfriend. Tonight, her attention is drawn to a pair of beady eyes. As she looks closer, she realizes they don’t come from a human but stare at her from a “beige gelatin splotch” next to a trash can.

“Blob: A Love Story,” By Maggie Su. Harper. 256 pages. $26.99

Vi, who kept snakes, turtles and lizards as childhood pets, is intrigued rather than repulsed. “I’ll come back,” she promises the blob. At 5 a.m., massively hungover, Vi stumbles back to the alley. The blob has moved from where she first saw it. She touches it. It’s not slimy but feels like a baby’s skin. And it breathes. She gives the blob a name: Bob.

Vi takes Bob back to her grotty basement apartment, puts it in a bowl of water and passes out while watching TV and eating junk food. When she wakes, “the blob is on my chest, eating Fruity Pebbles from my palm one by one.” She goes to work, leaving it in her apartment with “Top Chef” reruns, only to find it (him?) watching World Wrestling Entertainment matches when she returns.

Su’s ambitions extend beyond a Chiller Theater rom-com, despite her goofy setup and Vi’s snarky running commentary. Vi, with her condescension and sometimes outright contempt for those who care about her, can be hard to like. It’s to Su’s credit that not just Vi’s family and friends, but the reader as well, are continually enraged and amused by her prickly protagonist. Vi’s efforts to mold Bob into an ideal companion may backfire, but they force her to confront her many failures – of compassion and empathy but mostly of nerve.

Vi, the child of a White Midwestern mother and a Taiwanese father, has spent her “entire life … hovering above my otherness like a kid in a dunk tank.” She is a depressive, contrarian and often obnoxious college dropout. Her failed college stint studying biochemistry didn’t prepare her for Bob. So, she improvises. She orders Bob to grow an arm. He does, along with eyelids, limbs, facial features, a fully formed head. “At this rate, I could make a person by sunrise,” Vi realizes. She prints out photos of her movie heartthrobs, all men, all White. Like Bob.

The “Grow a Hot White Guy” narrative arc has some hilarious moments. In one of the novel’s funniest scenes, Vi takes the now fully developed, movie-star-handsome Bob to a family dinner, introducing him as her Danish boyfriend. No one notices that he answers questions by parroting facts he’s learned from watching “Jeopardy!”

The comedy alternates with more serious moments from Vi’s past – accounts of miserable family dinners with the well-meaning middle-class parents who tried in vain to protect a child who endured racial slurs at school. Vi’s snark and self-destructiveness coexist with a painful self-awareness, seeing herself since childhood as a member of “a tribe formed by exclusion.” With all their efforts to shelter her, Vi’s parents gave her no sense of their own pasts. “All I have are half-stories, blank spots in my family history.” She fills in those blanks with booze and rage and relentless sarcasm. “Nothing stops a conversation with a White person like the mention of race,” she observes.

Eventually, Bob leaves blobhood behind, developing not just human appearance but curiosity and desire. “For a while, he seemed happy enough to eat and breathe and exist – the perfect companion.” As Bob yearns for more, even if he’s not sure what that more is, Vi briefly grows creepily – even dangerously – possessive.

To say more would spoil the dark fun of this book. Suffice it to say that “Blob” isn’t a horror novel, and Bob isn’t the only one who evolves from a disagreeable lump into someone willing to accept who and what they are. In Su’s affecting Frankenstein story, the monster’s transformation is the least surprising one.

Elizabeth Hand’s most recent novel is “A Haunting on the Hill.”