Two of the three little pigs always get made fun of for their shoddy construction materials of straw and sticks; but you know what? Nat Cassidy managed to find something even more catastrophic to build a shelter out of when up against the big bad wolf: anxiety and existential dread. That house is starting to crumble before the BBW has even filled his lungs with the air to blow it down.

A Spoiler Free Synopsis: A between gigs actress avoids addressing an unexpected health scare by embarking on an impromptu road trip with a scared child that she’s only just met riding shotgun, as his apparent werewolf father pursues on paw.

Brief Thoughts: This was not the werewolf story I was expecting. Maybe that’s on me for making assumptions, but with a title like When the Wolf Comes Home I was expecting something along the lines of a home invasion creature feature that could rely on the setting to fully entrench itself in the themes of what happens when the terror lives in the house with you; when it’s the person you are supposed to trust the most who morphs into something unrecognizable, something truly monstrous, desanctifying your one promised safe space. Those themes are definitely present, but we also get… so much else.

A Favorite Highlighted Quote: “When he turns the corner around the side of the apartment complex, he runs straight into a slavering monstrosity that’s at least nine feet tall. It unseams him from groin to gullet, and he dies feeling the guts he always wished he had slide out onto the ground.”

Brief Thoughts (Cont.): Ok so obviously we do get some of the expected body horror and carnage only a werewolf can provide as it stalks 31-year-old, improv-enthusiast Jess and her unexpected, fish-out-of-water scene partner who just so happens to be said monster’s five-year-old son. But only just before the story quickly evolves into a completely unexpected mutation of the subgenre, for better or worse. 

Another Favorite Highlighted Quote:
“I did a little googling—“
“What’s googling?”
“Uh.” She thinks about how to best explain it. “Jesus.”
“What’s Jesus?”
“Never mind.”

Brief Thoughts (Cont.): I’m not opposed to road trip horror in general, but for a book that surprises with its unexpected deviation into It territory with both its incapable-of-foreseeing scares and treatise on the transformative nature of fear (how it shapes our view of the world, influencing how we interact with it and those in it), the structure just doesn’t work for me. Each pit stop encounter between point A and point B C D E just feels so prescribed in its plotting, even as the absurdity increases — the absurdity being the reason why I eventually found myself asking “are we there yet?”

One Last Thing: What was the point of the needle subplot? It distracts more than anything, feeling completely unnecessary to the story other than to substantiate the final horror sting that is Part Four. Admittedly, I think the book would resonate more with me had it ended with Part Three and that absolute doozy of a silver bullet that stopped me dead, but maybe that’s just me.

Final Thoughts: Though I appreciate the fresh take on the werewolf subgenre of horror, one that has further cementing my certainty that I do not want to be responsible for a child — in both a “dear god I have no patience for little terrors obnoxiously running amok” and “no matter what you do to protect them from existence, it will never be enough” sort of way — the funhousey nature of a large chunk of the “oh, so this is happening now? Sure why not” middle of the book was just a bit too much for me, no matter how thematically sound those bits may be.