When the Wolf Comes Home

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and mental illness.

Nat Cassidy is an American author who began his career as a playwright in New York City. Cassidy’s writing has always been oriented toward the literary tradition of horror, as evidenced by his early works. In 2011 and 2015, he wrote and staged two plays inspired by the work of American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, who works include the short story “The Call of Cthulhu” and the novella The Dunwich Horror. Cassidy pivoted to prose after producing a science-fiction noir narrative podcast called Steal the Stars in 2017. He subsequently wrote a novelization of the podcast, which was published the same year. Five years later, he would publish his first original novel, Mary: An Awakening of Terror.

In the Afterword to When the Wolf Comes Home, Cassidy states that his first three novels form an unofficial trilogy on personal loss and grief. Mary tells the story of a woman who moves back to her hometown and experiences terrifying visions and voices in her head, which reveal the truth about serial killings in the area. The novel frames the titular character’s haunting experiences as those of a middle-aged woman who is also experiencing menopause. While Mary finds herself in a transitional state, she also reacts to the shifts in the way people perceive her, driving a critique of patriarchal value systems.

Cassidy’s second novel, Nestlings (2023), revolves around two new parents, Ana and Reid, who win housing in a beautiful and stately Manhattan apartment. Ana becomes disturbed by a number of occurrences in the building, which threaten both her and the baby’s lives. When she raises her concerns with Reid, however, he challenges her perceptions, all the while unable to provide a plausible explanation himself. Cassidy explains in the Afterword to this novel that the book was intended to help him process the passing of his mother in 2021, among many other deaths and challenges that he and his wife faced over the course of the year.

When the Wolf Comes Home closes this trilogy by meditating on fatherhood and fear. In the Afterword, Cassidy shares that the book is written as a tribute to his late father. Though Cassidy is careful to explain that none of the characters were directly inspired by his father or the relationship that Cassidy had with him, some of the biographical details that he shares about himself and his father echo the novel’s key character dynamics.

For example, Cassidy discusses how, shortly after experiencing seasonal affective disorder, he learned from his mother that his father had experienced similar panic attacks. This resonates with a key scene late in the novel where protagonist Jess discovers that her estranged father, Tommy, shared her struggles with cowardice and anxiety. Cassidy narrates his father’s varied career, which included medicine, law enforcement, education, and religion. He describes his father as a “shape-shifter.” These details arguably inform the characters of Tommy and Calvert, especially as the novel uses them to tackle themes about fatherhood.