Few things have the staying power of horror tropes. Ghosts. Demonic possession. Zombies. Haunted houses. Vampires. Werewolves. Witches. Masked slashers of the human and supernatural varieties. Aliens. Tentacled monsters. Strange sounds in the middle of the night. Nonfiction narratives about the current state of the world.
The list goes on and on, and horror fiction lovers keep going back to those tropes, to that literary soul food, because it satisfies a special kind of hunger. Ah, but that staying power comes at a price: Breathe new life into these tropes with a unique voice or get thrown in the heap of the mere imitators, the writers who instead of soul food deliver the same old, tasteless soup from a can. But how do you make a cliché feel new, unique and exciting?
Nat Cassidy’s When the Wolf Comes Home is both a wildly entertaining novel and a superb answer to that question. In a nutshell, Cassidy wrote a great werewolf — or a “wolf-bear-thing” — novel by not writing a werewolf novel.
Jess is a cliché; a struggling actress with big LA dreams working as a waitress and cleaning bathrooms to get by. After an awful incident in which she stabs herself with a dirty needle while cleaning a mess in the bathroom, Jess comes home and instead of rest finds a 5-year-old runaway slithering around in the bushes outside her apartment. A few minutes later, a lot of people are dead and Jess finds herself running away from a monster with the kid in tow.
That synopsis covers the novel’s setup and stops at the right moment. When you read that, it sounds like a werewolf novel. And that’s what Cassidy wants. You know werewolf novels. You know about their smell and the painful transformations and the hunger, always the hunger. But there is no regular werewolf here. No howling at the full moon or heroes putting silver bullets in their guns. No, Cassidy made the werewolf a different creature — mainly a broken, desperate father. He also made the little boy a very special kid with an incredibly dangerous gift. Oh, and Jess is a very complex, very human character who must keep herself and the boy safe while learning as she goes — and simultaneously mourning the death of her estranged father.
