When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy

Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get into horror writer Nat Cassidy’s creepy and hard-to-put-down book, When the Wolf Comes Home. While not the first of his reads I have picked up, I really enjoyed this one and found it to be unique, scary, and riveting. It made me really look forward to checking out more of his books in the future.

Main Characters

Jess: Our main girl and, honestly, one of my favourite parts of this book, she’s messy, flawed, and emotional. Her empathy drives a lot of her decisions, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. When Jess meets the boy, she is brought into a horror scene she never expected. In an attempt to save him, she is pushed to intense limits and is forced to put herself in danger to try and help save the day.

The boy: Running away from a monster, the boy crosses paths with Jess, and is forced to face his fears in no way a child ever should, but he also has much more control than we may suspect.

Cookie: Jess’s mother, who, while maybe not always the best mom, pulls through for her daughter when it’s needed the most.

The man:  The boy’s father, who follows Jess and him in an attempt to get him back, however, follows at a distance due to the danger that follows his son.

My Review

As mentioned before, I’ve checked out some of Nat Cassidy’s other books and found them to be scary, but extremely enjoyable. When the Wolf Comes Home is an action-filled, thrilling novel, filled with horror and some people’s worst nightmares. The characters are enjoyable (and sometimes aggravating), but the plot itself is unique, and unlike anything I’ve ever dived into before. I gave it an 8/10 rating overall and am looking forward to diving into more of Cassidy’s spooky tales in the future.

The story follows Jess as she gets pulled into a deeply unsettling and increasingly terrifying situation involving a young boy and something not quite right. What starts as concern quickly turns into something much darker, with reality bending in ways that feel both surreal and way too real at the same time. As things escalate, the book leans hard into fear, what it does to us, how it changes us, and the choices we make when we’re pushed to our limits. Jess is forced to fight her greatest fears to protect the boy, but she also questions if she can really protect him from himself, or the realities of his world. The boy must question if he can fight off the monsters that haunt him, or crumble to the fear of his reality and what is chasing him.

As mentioned before, I’ve checked out other books of Cassidy’s, and when When the Wolf Comes Home came across my way, I knew I had to check it out. I saw lots of positive reviews and felt like it lived up to the hype for sure. This book is so unique. Like, genuinely nothing I’ve read before. The plot is wild in a way that somehow still works and makes sense, and I was completely locked in watching it unfold. The creativity here is insane, and the way everything comes together? So satisfying. It’s heartbreaking at different points, intense in others, but also loving and sweet in others. It has its gory parts, and some areas are a bit harder to stomach, but if you read lots of horror like I do, it’s really nothing crazy.

It’s fast-paced, emotional, and straight-up creepy. Not just surface-level scary, either, it gets under your skin. The kind of book where you feel uneasy even when nothing is technically happening because you are just waiting for that other shoe to drop. What really stood out to me is how much it focuses on fear. Not just the classic there’s something scary chasing you theme, but how fear actually changes people. The decisions, the reactions, the spiral, it all felt very intentional and honestly a little too real at times.

Jess carried this book for me. I loved her. She’s not perfect, and that’s exactly why she works so well. Her empathy, even when it complicates things, made everything hit harder emotionally. And yeah, the kid can be annoying, but in a way that makes sense. He’s a child dealing with trauma, and the book doesn’t shy away from that. If anything, it adds to the emotional weight.

This is not a feel-good book. Like, at all. My heart hurt more than once. But it’s a damn good one.

I had such a good time with this, and it definitely solidified that I need to keep reading more from Nat Cassidy.

Has anyone else checked out When the Wolf Comes Home, or any other of Nat Cassidy’s reads? What did you think, and what others would you recommend?

Thank you for checking out this review! I hope you enjoyed! Feel free to subscribe to the page on the bottom of the site to be one of the first to know when I post a new review.

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My debut novel, Ava, is a feminist speculative fiction story set in the near-future South. Its dystopian edge can feel uncomfortably close to home, and I know that kind of reading is not always wha…

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My year in books!

I read a total of 80 books this year, which surpassed my goal of 75. I also reached my page goal of 20.000 pages. These goals are just motivators, it isn't anything serious, but it can help me get out of a reading slump, or motivate me to pick up a book when I've spent a little too much time brain rotting. As you can see from my monthly recaps, I spent a lot less time reading over the summer than at the end of the year, which checks out. I also spent some time rereading old favorites, which I didn't count towards my yearly favorites.

Of the 80 books, the format was as follows:

- Print: 50, of which 44 from my shelves, the rest from the library.
- Audio: 23
- E-book: 7

Length averaged out at:
336 pages/11.3 hours

Goals for this year: I set my reading goals to pretty much the same as this year, at 80 books, and aiming for slightly more pages due to wanting to read some big books this year, so I set it at 22.000.

Due to limited shelf space, I'm removing books from my shelves when I've read them, and only then I'm allowed to buy new books to fill up those spaces, so I'm motivating myself to read my owned books with a reading prompt calendar from Booksandlala. The pink one is for my owned books, and I almost managed to fill it up with books from my shelves, but the asterisked* ones are titles from my TBR that I will have to buy (or get from the library). I always try to buy secondhand first, another way of staying mindful about my consumption of paper. The other prompt sheet is filled up with audio book titles from my TBR. I set myself a steps goal in 2025 and reached it, and I'm trying to stay on top of that this year as well, so that promises plenty of time for listening to audio books.

If you've read this far, let me know some of your favorites and most disliked books of 2025!

ETA: oh, and add me on The Storygraph if you want, @helloiammikki !

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Before Book One.

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A collection of mythic fragments from the world of Akidir.

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I loved Jurassic Park movie back in 1993 but never read the book since I'm so into other genres, but now I'm considering to buy the book and read it before watch the movie again. Should I?

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I loved Jurassic Park movie back in 1993 but never read the book since I'm so into other genres, but now I'm considering to buy the book and read it before watch the movie again. Should I?

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