When The Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
Tor Nightfire (April 2025)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
After reading Mary: An Awakening of Terror, I swore Nat Cassidy had written his magnum opus, not realizing it was his debut novel. And then I read Rest Stop from Shortwave, which is absolutely stellar with its exploration of historical trauma and triggers amongst the political state of things. And it was UNHINGED. So, I was certain that the novella was my new favorite. But, man, Cassidy came to the plate swinging with When The Wolf Comes Home and he knocked it out of the park. In his fairytale-inspired story Cassidy once again proves he’s one of the strongest voices in modern horror. His work is thoughtful, compelling, and fiercely chaotic as hell. I will devour EVERYTHING this man writes.
In When The Wolf Comes Home, a struggling actress, Jess, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding outside her apartment — and something is after him. After an unforgettably shocking and gory scene with the boy’s father, he and Jess run for their lives, hopping from hotels to an acquaintance’s home, and then back on the road again. But there’s more to this boy who Jess is so fiercely protecting and bloodshed seems to follow them wherever they go.
The kid has a strange power that can be beautiful, catastrophic, and deadly. And it made for a hell of a ride where no one is ever truly safe. I’ll never forget the disturbing scene with the mannequins. New fear unlocked. Thanks, Nat Cassidy.
While this book is loaded with terror, it pulls at your heart the way all Cassidy books eventually do. Jess struggles with the absence of her father, while the boy fears his. The father-son relationship lends itself well to the horror landscape. Think of Danny and Jack Torrance in The Shining or Cole and his father in Adam Cesare’s Clown In A Cornfield. There’s a complication rooted in what makes a man, often skewed into something toxic and abrasive, and that’s exactly how the boy sees his father in When The Wolf Comes Home. I love this because Cassidy effectively puts readers in the perspective of a frightened child, trying to make sense of both loving and fearing a parent. It’s a familiar premise but one the author approaches with a unique and sometimes hilariously absurd originality. The prose can be lyrical at times and quirky at others without ever feeling disjointed. It’s transformational, like the werewolf itself.
The pace was steady and I was hooked right from the beginning because shit goes down fast. The chase element will make readers tear through the pages like a wild wolf, howling through this emotionally evocative tale. And that ending. It was so satisfying even though it tore me apart and I wanted to curse the author.
I connected with Jess and the kid so often that reading When The Wolf Comes Home felt like speaking to my inner child. A conversation between child and adult. Both afraid but channeling that fear and expelling it in different forms; much like Jess and the kid.
As always, this reviewer implores you to read the introduction and afterword. Cassidy describes his emotional connection to the story and how at its heart, it’s a love letter to anxiety. He believes it’s the method actor in him that made him draw on his own experience with anxiety and with seasonal depression in his twenties.
This may be my new favorite from Cassidy. I can’t decide if it beat Mary. I’m hesitant because of how much I love the intro and afterword in his debut. But how awesome is it to have an author where you struggle to pick a favorite title because they’re all just that good. That’s what readers will find picking up their first Nat Cassidy read and When The Wolf Comes Home would be a hell of a place to start.
I would recommend this book to fans of Stephen King’s Rose Madder and Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays.
I am looking forward to reading Nat Cassidy’s novel, Nestlings. It’s burning a hole in my TBR.
