Nat Cassidy

When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy is a 304 page novel published in 2025 by Tor Nightfire.

Genre:

Horror, Paranormal

Blurb:

One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy’s father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.

As they attempt to evade the boy’s increasingly desperate father, horrifying incidents of butchery follow them. At first, Jess thinks she understands what they’re up against, but she’s about to learn there’s more to these surreal and grisly events than she could’ve ever imagined.

And that when the wolf finally comes home, none will be spared.

Opening Line:

Daddy is roaring.

My Thoughts:

What a wild ride!

Nat Cassidy’s horror pulls no punches, so make sure to read the content warnings at the beginning of the book, but honestly I thought they made it sound way worse than it actually was. His writing is as entertaining and humorous as it is gory (…well, maybe not quite – it’s pretty gory!) This time around, it’s also really touching.

Jess finds herself in charge of a terrified young boy on the run from his father, and neither might be quite what they seem (if you prefer stories rooted firmly in reality without any speculative/fantastical elements, look elsewhere). This is a road trip adventure that will keep readers on the edge of their seats while also pulling on their heart strings. A theme of this book is the old FDR quote about the only thing to fear being fear itself. I was riveted, amused, and loving the journey…

BUT THEN.

This was a 5 star read for me right up until a resolution I was deeply unhappy with. I suppose it was an ending that made a good deal of sense, but certainly it could have gone another way.

Despite how upset I was with how the author chose to conclude this book, it’s still true that I loved the experience of reading it overall, and so 5 stars it is–but just know I am currently not speaking to Nat Cassidy (but will continue reading anything he writes)!

P.S. As an 80s kid myself, I can confirm Who Framed Roger Rabbit was terrifying

Goodreads

Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy is a 405 page novel published by Tor Nightfire in 2022.

Genre: Horror

Opening Line:

There’s a corpse in the bathtub.

Synopsis:

Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.

But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.

Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.

Then the killings begin again.

Mary’s definitely going to find herself.

My Thoughts:

“Don’t call yourself crazy. That’s a word people use to make you small. Don’t do it for them.”

Holy moly, this book is bananas, but in the best way!

Normally I much prefer spooky supernatural horror to gory horror, but although this book is capital G Gruesome, there is so much more to it. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like it!

Mary is coming up on her fiftieth birthday and she’s not doing so great. Twice in this book she visits a male doctor and tells them each about the insomnia, the panic attacks–she even tells one of them the full truth, that she can’t look into a mirror without seeing her face in the reflection bubble up and burst in putrefication. Both doctors respond with, “And when was your last period?”

Due to an unfortunate series of events, Mary finds herself making the trip back to the isolated desert town she was born in, the town that was terrorized by a serial killer until he was killed by police nearly fifty years before. And then the killings start again.

You might like this book if you like unreliable narrators, vengeful spirits, true crime podcasts, and cults. You might like this book if you like your horror with a side of the absurd to surprise a laugh out of you now and then. You might like this book if you’re familiar with the nightmare that is perimenopause. You might like this book if you cheered when Neville Longbottom finally stood up for himself, but even moreso if your response to Stephen King’s Carrie was, “Good for her.”

Just bear in mind there is a whole lot of grisly subject matter here. If, like me, you’re able to look past that to all the amazing things about this story, then buckle in and get ready for one wild ride!

This book includes no steamy content, but all of the explicit on-page violence.

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