For Jess, I drew from much more faceless adult fears, things that I was also dealing with at the time, and things that people close to me were dealing with. She’s specifically an actor and an improviser, and a lot of that was because the existential crises that you face in that profession, speaking as an actor myself, are just so much harder to nail down and run away from. “Why aren’t I booking jobs? What is going on with the industry? Is the industry even going to survive long enough to let me work enough to get health insurance? Why isn’t my agent returning my calls? Will I ever get the roles I need to succeed and live my dreams?” These are the really mercurial and nebulous sort of fears that you can’t just pin on this one shadowy monster in the corner of your room.
Paste: Opposite Jess, you have this nameless little boy she has to take care of, with his own sets of fears and a unique understanding of the world. What was it like for you to go back and write from this kid’s perspective and tap back into that feeling of unbridled imagination that you have when you’re a kid?
Cassidy: That’s a great question and doubly interesting because the book I’m currently writing right now is my homage to the “kids on bikes” subgenre. The protagonists I’m writing right now are all 10 or 11, and it has been a challenge, an exciting challenge to remember what it’s like to be that age. I’ve been able to manufacture a bunch of questionnaires to give to friends’ kids of that age because the book is set now, it’s set in current times. So I’m able to ask people of that age, “What is life? What are your thoughts? How do you feel about certain things?” and kind of remember what it was like to be that age through direct sources.
You can’t do that with a five-year-old. So it was an additional, interesting challenge to write from a five-year-old’s perspective, not to mention this particular five-year-old is very deprived of context. He’s kept very secluded. He doesn’t have pop culture references of any kind. He doesn’t have narrative references of any kind. He doesn’t know anything, let alone how to interact with another person besides his very disciplinarian father. So that made it additionally complicated to make sure I was authentically portraying what it might be like to have all of this imagination, all of this energy, all of this wonder for everything, and very little callous built up.
Five-year-olds are already super sensitive to things, but this kid is so much more sensitive to any kind of stimulus because he’s had no preparation for it whatsoever. I think I was drawing on the most extreme memories I could think of as a kid myself, because I was also very, very sensitive at that age, and was also deeply compelled to interact with things that I knew would mess me up. I’ve loved horror ever since I have been a conscious being, and I paid the price for it again and again and again, especially at that age, and was constantly terrified of every shadow, of songs. I was terrified of music as a kid.
There are moments in this book where there are off-handed references to Jess remembering when she was that age, and she was weirdly frightened of the theme song to Ghostbusters, which is not a part of that movie that people think of as frightening, but that was based on me. I was terrified of the idea of an invisible man sleeping in your bed. The theme to Duck Tales freaked me out because of the middle where it’s like, “There’s a stranger out to find you,” and it was just like, “Oh my God, that’s so scary.”
Kids experience time in such a different way, so you could just experience this perfect universe of fear in a two-second line, in a really up-tempo, cheery song. It wouldn’t be diluted by any of its context. It would just be so intensely terrifying, and you would dread it coming up, and then it would come up and you’d be terrified, and then you’d go on with your life. I have such clear memories of the primary colors of fear at that age. So this was a really fun opportunity to revisit what it was like to look at the world and see peril and wonder in equal measure, all around you at all times.
Paste: You craft this really interesting dynamic between these two people who view fears in very different ways. Once the book gets going, Jess and the kid form a bond that’s not quite parent/child, or big sibling/little sibling. It’s just these two searchers trying to figure out their situation. How did you see their relationship?
Cassidy: I love that question, and I love their dynamic. I really do, for exactly the reason you just articulated. It wound up developing into this interesting, almost peer relationship despite the noticeable age difference. I think part of that grew out of me trying to honestly portray how I think I would be in that situation, too. I don’t have a ton of experience around kids that age, and maybe I’m drawing on memories of being that age as well. But I hated being condescended to as a kid, and so I don’t want to condescend to a kid. So whenever I’m around kids I constantly find myself at this weird impasse of like, “Oh, I just want to talk shit with you. Let’s talk about the world.” That’s not always successful with someone who doesn’t know much of what’s going on, but can also lead to really interesting observations and conversations.
So were I to find myself suddenly as a guardian to a very strange and imperiled child, I think I would act the way Jess acts in this book. At first, she’s really not a fan of how upset and terrified this kid can be, and how there are some very bad tantrums and things like that. The kid won’t listen to reason. Shouldn’t a five-year-old just be really rational? And she has to learn how to meet him where he’s at. Then once they start to get comfortable, she starts to realize that they have a lot in common in very strange and beautiful ways. So she’s able to see herself in him and kind of see him in herself, which allowed me to avoid a sort of more clichéd, “Oh, now she’s developing into a mother figure,” or something like that.
Instead, it’s just these two damaged children themselves trying to figure out a way to navigate this very frightening world together as best they can. There are a lot of screw-ups and there is a lot of poor planning and poor reactions on both ends. They’re both stunted in a lot of ways, primarily because of their father relationships, I think. It says everything about Jess’s ability to find the maturity to run with this situation, I thin,k because of the incredibly supportive, loving mother figure that she has in this book, her mother, Cookie. Because Jess is able to draw on that influence as well as the searching that she’s done within herself, that enables her to figure out how to navigate this situation, this dynamic, a little bit more healthily.
Paste: And with that established, you throw in another ingredient, which is that this boy, without giving too much away, has imaginative powers that he doesn’t fully understand and that manifest in some very frightening ways. When did that ingredient emerge, and how did that become the other shoe to drop in this story?
Cassidy: It came about at the same time that I knew this was going to be a werewolf-adjacent story. One of, I think, the promises you make when you’re writing a story about fatherhood and father-child dynamics is that you would be doing the narrative a disservice if you didn’t explore how the child is like the father. I know that’s something that I go into in the afterword. That’s something that I wrestled with myself when trying to untangle a very strange relationship with my very strange father as well. I was like, “How am I like him? How am I not like him? What genetic traps am I going to fall into? What behavioral traps am I going to fall into? What mistakes do I want to avoid? What mistakes would he want me to avoid?”
I wanted to portray that reality in this story by making sure the father wasn’t the only, let’s say, source for fear and complication, that there’s more than one kind of monster in this book and more than one kind of danger, so that the boy represents his own kind of threat because he is a character who was forged by the initial threat. And so that was the thematic reason, let’s say.
The additional kind of more fun and games reason is that when telling a story like this, you want to make sure it’s always a game of stakes raising. Once they escape the initial peril of this monster trying to slaughter them and they find a little bit of safety, what is the next peril that Jess and the boy have to face? And the answer kind of seemed inarguable to me that that peril must be what parts of the father are in the boy, that now they have to deal with. I will leave it to readers to discover just how much of that is actually accurate, what is the chronology of threat at play here, but that was the kind of thinking behind that was that there can’t be any port in this storm of a story and that it is our filial obligation to constantly be examining where our parents end and where we begin.
Paste: Last question, and it’s a heavy one, but because you talked about where our parents end and where we begin, it feels unavoidable. This was clearly a novel in which you explored fatherhood and sonhood very deeply in the context of a fun horror story. How did writing the book change your view of fatherhood and family? What impact did it have?
Cassidy: Oh, you weren’t kidding, Matthew. Jesus. Let’s see. Let’s see. Let’s find an answer that honors this very good question. My wife and I explored this in Nestlings because Nestlings was written when my wife and I were on the tail end of a fertility journey that was ultimately unsuccessful. There are plenty of other ways to be a parent that we are going to explore, so it’s not the end of that journey at all. But it drew to a close one very prominent method of parenthood, let’s say. And so Nestlings has a lot of grief in it.
This story allowed me to explore my relationship with my own father and my relationship to the idea of fatherhood, which especially during the course of trying to become a parent, that’s something you find yourself thinking about all the time anyway, like, “Am I ready for this? What would this mean for me? What could I do differently? How afraid of this am I?”, that entire very complicated bag of emotions. But this allowed me to embrace the idea that there are, as I’ve already articulated, alternate ways of being a caregiver, of being a parent, of taking care of someone younger than you and to maybe lean into the, I don’t want to say comfort per se because that implies a discomfort that I don’t know that I feel, but a sort of embracing of that potential dynamic of eventually finding yourself caring for someone who maybe already existed before you created them and that that is a very powerful relationship and a very important relationship as well.
It also made for a very cathartic way to explore what it meant to have a father whose relationship with his kids was very eclectic, let’s say, diverse, changeable. I think all of my siblings and I have very… The reason why I’m struggling is because I’m trying to find a different word than complicated, but I keep coming back to complicated because that kind of does the work I need it to do to accurately describe it. We all loved our dad very, very much, and my dad was a really wonderful person, and such a fascinating perso,n and a bizarre person. And as such, there were moments in his parenting journey where I think there were a lot of things that would need to be explored for decades to come.
This book was my process of exploring that and honoring the beauty of that complication, that I know he felt as well, because of the few conversations we were able to have about him as a father and his track record as a father. I know he also articulated that there were many things that he wished he could have done differently and many things he was very proud of, and many things that he also wanted to continue unpacking for as long as he could, and so I think this story allowed me to find a propulsive and entertaining way to do service to that investigation that I think he would be proud of and that I think he would’ve appreciated.
When The Wolf Comes Home is now available wherever books are sold.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.
