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.

Author Spotlight: Horror Author Jillian Maria

Jillian is a sapphic author who loves stories with big feelings and a lot of heart — even if that heart is a little bloody and bruised. When not writing, you can usually find her doting on her cat, listening to music, or gently obsessing over whatever piece of media has currently grabbed her attention.

Author Links:

All links: byjillianmaria.com

Book Sample: Read the first 3 chapters of A Colder Home on Jillian’s website.

Elevator Pitch for Readers/Book Clubs:
Real terror plagues the production of an amateur horror film when a blizzard traps cast and crew in a haunted house. But Cleo finds herself strangely drawn to the ghosts on the other side of her camera…

Your novel, A Colder Home, was just released in February (2026). What has been the most enjoyable part of the whole process for you, from the drafting stage to publication? What parts are you glad to be over?

What a great question! I’m going to have to answer it out of order, though. A Colder Home is, without exaggeration, one of the hardest books I’ve ever written. So when it comes to what I’m glad to be done with, I definitely won’t miss the parts where I stopped a draft halfway through because I couldn’t finish it, or the times where every word felt like pulling teeth.

There were several times where I put away the draft sure that I was shelving it for real this time. I’ve abandoned other projects over far less! But this was one book that I just couldn’t give up on. And I think that made it all the more exciting when the story did finally “click” for me. That moment where I worked out what the story was about was incredibly satisfying, and it made me grateful for every draft — and half draft! — that made it possible.

What inspired this ghost story, and do you have any experience with the paranormal yourself?

I love ghosts as a metaphor. The specters you find in this story are not souls so much as they are manifestations, influenced and warped by the perceptions of those left behind. I was very much inspired by my own experience with grief.

Specifically, the strange feeling of realizing that your memory of a lost loved one is fallible, and for better or for worse, you’re remembering the version of them that you want to remember. Sometimes that means remembering them as better than they were, and sometimes it means magnifying their worst traits to lessen the sting of missing them.

Either way, it’s very difficult to hold onto the whole complex version of someone in your head, especially when they’ve been gone for a long time.

I will say, earlier versions of this story had far more sentient ghosts. Virginia, and to a lesser extent Laura and Gerald, had agendas and goals of their own. But I found that it slowed the story’s momentum, and sort of muddied the message. Having them be a little less human made the story far scarier, and made the themes a lot stronger.

I can’t say I’ve had a genuine paranormal experience, although I’ve had a few that come close! And I’m definitely open to it. I love hearing about local ghost stories when I travel.

The story is about the cast and crew of an amateur horror film; what drew you to these characters, and what made you decide a horror film production would be a good vehicle for this story? 

I knew from the very start that I wanted this story to be about a horror film production, but it wasn’t until much later in the process that I started to grapple with what that actually meant. In early drafts, “horror movie production plagued by real ghosts” just felt like a really fun concept! But somewhere along the way, the story started to ask questions about what it means to be an artist, to make art. And the story eventually became about the creation of art, in a way… how it can be used to process difficult emotions, or how it can be used to wallow in them.

What is your character development process like – how do they take shape from first idea to final form, and who are you most excited for people to meet?

Nothing about the writing of this book has followed my “usual” process, and that includes character development! Building out the initial cast was pretty easy because of the conceit of the book — a film production needs a cast and a crew — but while roles and basic traits have stayed more or less the same, each character evolved along with the plot.

Most changes got made based on the needs of the story.

For example: Cleo, my main character, changed a lot from her initial concept. She was always the film’s cinematographer, but in earlier drafts she was also the main director and the one calling most of the shots. She was a perfectionist and a bit of a control freak, because she had a really hard time trusting other people. But in later drafts, that perfectionism turned inward. She doesn’t trust herself, and it’s paralyzed her so that, in the final version of the story, this is the first time she’s even tried to make a movie in years, and she’s already half given up on it before it’s even begun.

It was odd to realize that I actually needed to make my main character more passive, because it feels like it goes against traditional narrative structure, but for the kind of story I wanted to tell and the themes I was trying to convey, it just made sense. And it made her final arc far more satisfying.

But we needed someone driving the early part of the story, so a lot of early Cleo’s bossiness and determination got shuffled to Noah.

Originally her co-director that she struggled to effectively delegate to, he became the movie’s champion, doing his best to keep things on track even as the supernatural elements of the plot ramped up. I really liked this change in him, because it made him a far more complex character. It also made him really fun to write from Cleo’s perspective! He’s her cousin, and she’s known him for so long that she’s got a lot of preconceived notions about the type of person he is.

The original version of him didn’t actually stray that far from what she thinks of him, but in this draft, we’re able to peel back those layers a bit more. Other characters went through similar changes based on what the narrative needed. Isobel ended up getting a lot more philosophical and thoughtful as the story became more about artistry and what it means to be creative — this had the added bonus of deepening her romance with Cleo, as both of them open up about their aspirations and what their respective arts mean to them. I ended up giving Declan an interest in occultism and spiritualism because his nature made him a good foil for Rhiannon, the resident sceptic.

Andrea and Zander ended up getting more page time as certain events got shuffled around, and it made them far more interesting as a result!

Were there things you cut out of the final draft that you wish you’d kept in, or things that you’ve added that went in fairly late in the drafting stage, and can you tell us anything about them in a spoiler-free way? 

Ooooh, absolutely! There’s plenty that didn’t make it to the final cut that I wish did. A sillier one is an early scene where Cleo and Noah get fast food together. They have this routine where they order one vanilla and one chocolate milkshake, and then Noah splits them in half and mixes them together with his bare hands while Cleo makes a show of being disgusted by him. It was a fun look into their dynamic and unfortunately had to go for pacing, as now we start the book right at the beginning of filming.

One of the final major developmental edits I made was the decision to make Michelle, the owner of the home, a painter. That detail ended up solving a LOT of the issues in earlier drafts, and also helped reinforce that theme of making art! A lot of what you see in the final book is a result of that decision.

Lastly – what has been your favourite ARC reader responses so far?

A few beta readers told me that they cried real tears reading it. That’s pretty special!

Like This? Try These:

• Author Spotlight: Horror/Paranormal Author Amanda Leanne Date May 30, 2025 In relation to Author Interview
• Author Spotlight: Queer Horror Author Kaos Emslie Date October 2, 2024 In relation to Author Interview
• Women in Horror Month 2026: Beware the Ladies of the Night Date March 6, 2026 In relation to Women in Horror Month
• Author Spotlight: Horror Author Emma Murray Date April 25, 2025 In relation to Author Interview
• Author Spotlight: Horror Author Shawn Winchell Date July 25, 2025 In relation to Author Interview
• Author Spotlight: Paranormal Author Jason A. Kilgore Date December 10, 2025 In relation to Author Interview

EDIT: APPLICATION CLOSED
Skull Daddy is back! And he's on the hunt for beta readers. Check out the application form for the book description and content warnings. If you think you've got what it takes, you're welcome to apply - whether you've read the original or not.

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A perfect Christmas gift tonight!
"The Mansion of Nightmares", edited under Club Diógenes/Valdemar (Spain, 2025). 25 stories about haunted houses by different writers in 695 pages. I wanna start reading soon!

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Can't wait to get your hands on GOATS? The eBook is now available for pre-order through select online readers! And remember: ARC applications are still open if you want a shot at reading the book before anyone else 🐐
(Links in bio)

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