Nat Cassidy, author of the acclaimed horror Mary, returns with When the Wolf Comes Home, an unabashed, adrenaline-fueled pop horror thriller where the darkest fears can become reality.
Child death.
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, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them—the boy can turn his every fear into reality.
And when the wolf finally comes home, no one will be spared.
Don't just take our word for it...
“This is the kind of great, big, epic horror novel we got back in the ’80s that came out swinging for the fences and left everything on the field. Welcome back, you shaggy, bloody monster of a book!”
– Grady Hendrix
“I finished reading the book about a week ago, and it keeps sliding back into my thoughts and conversations… Wolf carries with it a harrowing inevitability. The feeling you get, maybe, when one enters the Twilight Zone, and you just know things will be different now… Nat Cassidy has tapped into something with this one: it’s the mood all us readers are always digging for: the Truth, a truth, his truth… the sort of truth you add to your own.”
— Josh Malerman, New York Times Best Selling author of Bird Box and Incidents Around the House
“When The Wolf Comes Home is a sharp-edged metaphor for trauma and rage, for how they seep into us, how we carry them in us and how sometimes, we pass them on like a curse.”
– Cassandra Khaw, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Nothing But Blackened Teeth
Taste the very first page
Daddy is roaring
Howling.
Destroying everything in the house – furniture, pictures on the wall, all of it – while he searches for the boy.
The boy is couched inside the pantry. Hidden. For Now.
Hardnoise, he thinks in his terror, flinching at the sounds of destruction. He’s seen Daddy angry plenty of times before…. but not like this. This is so much worse than all the other times.
“How?!” Daddy demands in a deep, raspy voice. “Where?!” It sounds as if the words rip out of him, pulling bits of throat along the way. “Where … ind.. I-i-t?”
The boy – who is only five years old and small for his age – shrinks further inside the pantry. He thinks about disappearing completely, but knows he can’t. The thing he’s clutching to his chest keeps him moored to the world. The thing Daddy is raging about.
The book.
Lately, the boy had been sneaking out a window while Daddy took his afternoon naps. He knew it wasn’t allowed, that it’s Bad and Dangerous, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. The call of the outside world was too great, and for all his rules and precautions, Daddy hasn’t yet realized the boy figured out how to open that window.
Daddy’s naps are always the same time and the same length every day, so the boy never went far on these walks. Usually, he just stood and looked around for a bit before scrabbling back inside. He looked at the other houses. At the cars driving by. The little rocks with bits of sparkle in them. The trees. A lizard. A stray cat. Things he’d seen or heard from the other side of the window, usually accompanied by Daddy’s dry, detailed explanations of what they were looking at. “So you never have to wonder.” Daddy always said.
But it was so much nicer to experience them. So much more exciting to wonder.
A few days ago, the boy let himself walk down the block a little, and that’s when he’d discovered the tiny house. It was in a neighbor’s front yard: a ting house on a short pole. The tiny house had a little glass door, and inside… was all books. If the boy could read, he still might have not known what the phrase Little Library meant, but he thought the teal calligraphic squiggles were pretty.
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