Last month, Nat Cassidy published his fifth novel, “When The Wolf Comes Home.” It’s a horror story about a young boy and an aspiring actress, both being pursued by a violent, vicious monster. The book has already been called a classic by no less than Stephen King.
Cassidy joined The Show to discuss how that was a big deal. Not just because Stephen King is Stephen King, but because when Cassidy was a kid here in Phoenix, books by King and other horror authors helped him make sense of the world.
Full conversation
NAT CASSIDY: I grew up on 32nd Street and Bell [Road], in the, you know, early '80s through the mid to late '90s. And at the time, especially when I was younger, on one side of the intersection, we had our grocery store, which was a Smitty's. And then the other side was nothing. And it kind of informed, I think, an outlook that I had, which was I needed to be able to provide my own entertainment and my own connection.
SAM DINGMAN: Well, I'm really glad that you you brought up this idea of having to generate your own entertainment and to do it in your immediate surroundings, because I've also heard you talk about these rows of mass-market paperbacks that lined the shelf of your house when you were a kid. And people will perhaps be able to see where this is going, but they all seem to have fit into a particular genre. Is that fair to say?
CASSIDY: Yeah, my mom was a huge horror fan. So, there was just Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Clive Barker and Anne Rice. I don't know, it put those titles specifically in like this vaunted totemic, sort of, position in my mind as a kid. And I was raised by a single, working mom who couldn't really afford to police the things that my brother and I were reading. So, she was basically like, “Once you think you're ready for these books, you can read them.”
DINGMAN: You said another thing once that stuck in my mind and that feels connected there, which is that you had the sense that part of your mom's love of those books was that it was ... “a way to metabolize the awfulness.” Can you tell me what you meant by that?
CASSIDY: Yeah, my mom — so again, she was a single working mom in the in the '80s and '90s, which was no easy time to be a single, working mom. Not that it's ever easy. But she was also dealing with [multiple sclerosis] and had been dealing with MS since she was like in her 20s. So, it's been a long road already with a progressive disease. And there was always the sense that sooner or later it was gonna start getting worse and worse and worse. And so she was dealing with that while also dealing with, you know, being a woman in the workplace, and occasionally trying to like go on a date. And also raising two sons all by herself. And so that was a lot of really challenging, you know, existentially dreadful things.
I got the sense from a very early age that these stories that she was drawn to enabled her to pressure release a little bit ... to knock the, sort of, anxieties that she was dealing with down a few pegs. And to also in a way like communicate with me and my brother about these very heavy things that we would be, over the course of our life, you know, be asked to integrate into the way that we understand the world. You know, like I have very early memories of watching my mom being driven away in an ambulance because she was having an MS attack. And that's a really heavy thing for a kid to process. But if you can also like, sit down and watch “The Fly” with that kid, it's a little lighter to process in a weird way.
DINGMAN: Yeah, it, it gave, it sounds like if I'm hearing you right, it gave you guys a language to communicate about these things. I have to say it makes me think about the thing that I connected with the most personally about "When the Wolf Comes Home," which is the character of Jess. Because Jess is somebody who fundamentally is in the prime of her life. And her life has not gone the way that she wanted her life to go. And she has huge dreams, and it's just not working. And she can't figure out how to get it to work. And then obviously, the circumstances of the book sweep her up into a new life where all of a sudden she's like, “OK, I guess this is my life now.”
CASSIDY: Yeah.
DINGMAN: And the thing that I loved so much about that is that that doesn't feel like the premise of a horror novel to me, necessarily. That feels like just an extraordinarily human connection to be able to make with a character. And if that's where she is — and I buy that state of mind that she's in — I would follow that character anywhere. Whether it was, you know, fleeing a horrifying monster, or, you know, if you were writing in some completely different genre. It just seemed like you had invested so much in the emotional truth of Jess.
CASSIDY: I'm so glad you framed it this way, because sometimes I will rankle when people refer to Jess in reviews or something like that as “a failed actress.” That makes me so mad, because she is not a failed actress. She's an actress whose dreams aren't coming true, as you've just said. This book is attempting to kind of dramatize the way that the primary color of fear refracts and distills until it becomes this shapeless thing that you can't run away from.
DINGMAN: Yeah, it's not that you escape it, it's that you just come to terms with it. You almost make friends with it.
CASSIDY: Yeah. It was a weirdly similar journey through my relationship with horror as a genre, even 'cause like — as I described earlier, like, I was a morbid, horror-obsessed little kid. And I was walking through a Blockbuster, as was my want — as was all of our wants at the time. And I was always drawn to the horror section, because I would just like, look at the covers of these VHS. And they were so mind-blowingly scary and garish and weird and wild and beautiful. And I was always like, “What stories could these images even be from? How does anyone watch this?”
And there was one cover in particular, which was De Palma's “Carrie.” There was just something about Sissy Spacek, that covered in blood with her eyes wide open, and she just looked so shocked and horrified. And I was terrified of her. I saw Carrie everywhere when I was a little kid. And I eventually had to beg my mom to tell me the story of Carrie, just to like help me get my little brain hands around it. And she told it to me in such a way that Carrie wasn't a figure to be feared, but to be loved, to be sorry for. That she was this girl who didn't ask for these horrible things to happen, and people pushed her too far.
And, from that point on, I started talking to her when I was alone as a little kid. Like, I would literally say out loud, like, “Please don't hurt me, Carrie, I'm so sorry they were mean to you. I'll be your friend, let me be your friend, just don't hurt me.” And so, it was like just like such a, such a kind of silly kind of stupid little kid logic. But there's something so pure about that, and it really did represent how I started to look at horror as a thing that you do have to learn to live with.
You have to find a way to talk to the things that scare you. ... They might still scare you, but eventually you'll come to realize that, you know, it doesn't have to be a vampiric relationship or a parasitic relationship. But like, we can work together, you and me, fear. Like, we can kind of find an agreement, a co-op, as it were.
