REVIEW: When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
It’s said that all authors write the same books over and over, and while this can sometimes seem like a theory in pursuit of evidence, horror wildchild Nat Cassidy has done his best to prove this both true and a good thing in his excellent run of Mary, Nestlings and Rest Stop, which all ruthlessly explore the idea of what happens when your biggest unexamined fears, anxieties, and faults come home to roost. So it’s fitting that his new book, When the Wolf Comes Home, puts this theme straight in the title—and even more fitting that it’s not just his best book but a genuine horror classic. Hurricane Cassidy has landed, and the devastation it wreaks will leave you breathless.
First, let’s be clear. When the Wolf Comes Home is one of those books that must not be described, so full of twists and blind alleys is it. So to paraphrase Tyrion Lannister, if you want a synopsis, you’ve come to the wrong place. We have Jess, a struggling actress, who comes home to find a five-year-old child in the bushes. After a violent and seemingly monstrous encounter with his father, they go on the run from him, and utter chaos and carnage ensures. That’s all you’re getting, and for good reason, because this is a book that plays with your expectations like a lion with its mewling prey.
What we can say is that the theme of fatherhood looms strong over this book, a warped shadow infecting every paragraph. Jess’s father was pretty rubbish. The child she’s now on the run with doesn’t seem to have a good one either. Bad fathers is a common theme in horror, but Cassidy goes deep into investigating the legacy they leave and how Jess might try and make amends with this child—and how in doing so she risks continuing the legacy of parental failure. These kid-surrogate parent moments form some of most powerful parts of this book; jokey conversations that turn heartbreaking on a dime. The character work is superb.
But if you’re thinking this is a quiet one, don’t be mistaken. This is an insane, whirlwind, chaotic book of fever nightmares for large parts. Gory, brutal, unexpected, and goddamn those twists. Classically, pace can come at the expense of character and thematic work, but Cassidy laughs in the face of such cliche. In this it reminded me of one of the most triumphant of Stephen King’s works, Firestarter, which married relentless action with blisteringly strong parent-child moments. But When the Wolf Comes Home is King dipped in rampant hallucinogens and pumped through Satan’s loudspeaker.
But put aside the traumatising Looney Tunes scene and arguably the the worst conclusion to a game of bridge ever and a dozen more horrors and When the Wolf Comes Home is a whipsmart, fatalistic examination of fear, and its sister anxiety, which asks: are we powerless in our fear, moulded this way by our genetic inheritance? Or can we face it and transform it into something else, retool our toxic legacy into something new so when the wolf finally comes home, we face it with a grin?
When the Wolf Comes Home might feature a wolfman but it’s Dr Frankenstein I’m left in mind: Cassidy has brought life to an unspeakably effective stitchwork of relentless pace, twists and horrifical tableaus fused with some of the most satisfying thematic closure and poignant character work you’ll read for a while. It’s a nightmarish but meaningful existential creation you won’t see coming—this wolf will blow your house down.
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