Information:

• Goodreads: 4.60 out of 180 Ratings (ARC Copies being Review, Releases April 22nd, 2025)
• Age Category: Adult
• Series: None
• Genere: Horror

Summary:

No one will be spared when the wolf comes home.

Jess is not having a good night. She’s hanging out with her friend, Marjorie, when a guy comes out of the bathroom, clearly having some stomach issues. Majorie makes a deal: you clean the bathroom and then you can go home. And Jess hops on that opportunity. You know, she’s got an audition tomorrow, she’s gotta be ready. She hasn’t been having much luck in that department lately. Unfortunately, cleaning the bathroom goes to shit and she has to go to the hospital, but finds herself at home instead. Poor girl’s on autopilot. And her night gets even weirder when she finds a scared young boy, a naked man arguing with her neighbors, and a weird bear/wolf thing ripping into people. Now she’s on the run with a boy who gets weirder and weirder as times goes. And she still can’t get to the damn hospital.

Review:

I absolutely loved this. I was sobbing by the end of it, so points for getting so much emotion out of me. I love seeing an adult and a child try to bond during times of distress. I can’t explain it, it just does something for the child within me and the mother I am. It’s part of why I loved Mistborn so much. This book has such an interesting dynamic of a woman trying to protect and young boy and growing to care for him while also being terrified of him the entire time. This is a book about grief. About parents and how they fail even when they think they might be doing what’s best. It’s about a girl and boy who try to find some semblance of family while on the run from the government, police, and an angry father. Definitely a five star read.

“Daddy is roaring. Howling. Destroying everything in the house – furniture, pictures on the wall, all of it – while he searches for the boy.“

Nat Cassidy’s writing reads as so incredibly simple, yet can also have a profound impact. That sentence is how the book starts. “Daddy is roaring.” And, holy shit, is it a fantastic beginning. You know what you’re getting into on the first page. A young boy, 5 years old, is terrified of his Daddy. This is a hard read in that aspect and Nat Cassidy, thankfully, ensures that he has trigger warnings in the beginning of his books. Make sure you’re aware of the trigger warnings before reading – murder, gore, dismemberment, needle trauma, blood borne diseases, spiders, insects, suicidal ideations, grief, child trauma, alcoholism, parental death, child death, child trauma, and child endangerment. It is not a small book as far as triggers go. Nat Cassidy is wonderful at handling these topics with care and grace – as much as he can while being a horror novel. There’s no moment in this book that made me feel as if it shouldn’t have happened. There are definitely moments that shocked me. Moments that made me sad, cry, and uncomfortable. But never a moment that felt like it didn’t have its purpose or place.

“Hers was just found dead a little over a week ago, and she still has no goddamn idea how to feel about it. Fuckin dads ruin everything….And there’s Inner Jess, who see’s him everywhere. Who’s working overtime to force everything into the context of him. I wonder if Dad liked this cereal, too. I wonder what kind of music was he listening to lately? Did he put his socks on before or after his pants? Did he ever think about me?“

Spoilers – Death of a loved one who was also a source of trauma is complex and messy and I loved how Cassidy handled it. Grief is everywhere in this book (so is death, honestly). This is a book about death and fear. Particularly, how we can make our fears to be bigger than they truly are. The boy is afraid of his father. Why? His father was grieving and was angry and doing what he thought was best, yet still failing his son. The more the father got angry, the more afraid the boy became, resulting in the father being more mean and angry in this vicious cycle. At the end, the father can’t control it any more than the boy can and they’re stuck in this loop and grieving what they should’ve had, but can’t.

It’s interesting seeing who the real villain is within this story and realizing that no one is really at fault other than maybe the government and, honestly, when are they not at fault in some way? The boy can’t change the fact that he was born as he is. The father can’t control the boy’s fear. Yes, there are ways he could’ve handled him and things he could’ve done differently. But, ultimately, there is a time when every child is afraid of something, somewhere and their imaginations are limitless. Chaos would ensue regardless. The ending wrecked me because we finally had that moment when the boy realized his dad is just a man. And he was able to hug his father. His father was hugging him, they were both sobbing. It was a beautiful moment. And then, like other themes of the book, a parent does what they think is best that ends up hurting the child. How do you protect your child from itself? How do you protect your child from you? And how do you protect the world from your child? It’s rough. It’s heart breaking. And the story ends on that heartbreak.