A good and interesting horror story is hard to find for me. Although I can easily visualize horror scenes as I read them, they just don’t have the same effect on me as their movie counterpart. For my tastes, psychological horror is a bit more to my liking. When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy is one that has a lot going for it, but I really, really think that it could have been so much more. If you personally have daddy issues, well, you might get triggered here. There’s a lot of that to spread around in this story. Surprisingly, I found a couple of the violent and gory scenes and descriptions to be actually quite scary. Ultimately, I really like the idea of what the author has going on here, but boy, I think he could have done much more with it.

Jess is really the only main character worth analyzing as she’s the main star. Here is where the first slight disappointment came for me. Jess is really not that interesting. Here we have another down-on-the-luck girl with a dead-end waitress job in LA with hardly any friends or lovers. She has hopes of making it big in the movie/film industry, but nothing has really stuck. Her best friend is her mom. And… she has intense daddy issues due to her father running out of her life very early on. We luckily do get to witness some witty remarks from Jess from time to time, but that’s about it. I think the author could have spent a few more chapters or two fleshing out Jess just a bit more.

“Maybe if I close my eyes, this’ll all go back to normal…” Jess

The ultimate horror of this story stems from how a little boy with supernatural powers is able to make things a reality just by thinking it. Yeah, I know, not exactly the most fresh of ideas, but done correctly in a story, it can provide so much room for the author to maneuver. And here is where I am disappointed the most. I really felt like for the majority of the book, apart from the beginning, we spend a whole lot of time reading of Jess and the boy being on the run. That and Jess trying her best to placate him so he doesn’t get triggered into using his powers. Yes, if a normal person like myself was in the same situation, I likely would have done the same. But in a story? I would have wanted to see both Jess and the boy thrown into much more awkward and hard-to-escape situations. Situations along their journey where Jess has to make harder and harder decisions. During their escape, they hardly encountered anyone! Again, that’s an A+ job on Jess’s part, if this was real life.

She’s truly on her own now. No one to stand between her and death anymore.

The best scene for me has got to be what happened to Agent Santos. His ending scene was, in my opinion, one of true horror from how I imagined it would have looked. That and the next scene describing what happened to his mother. I can imagine her mouth in an unending scream, sending goosebumps to my arms. All in all, I had a pretty good time with this novel. I didn’t have an issue with how the story ended. I’m a bit curious to see how Jess will fare going forward. Will a grown adult do that much better than a kid? Will she turn into the “dreamer” referenced in the story, or will she continue living her life as usual? If the author had gotten a bit more creative, I think this book would have gotten either a 4 or a 4.5 stars from me. As it is, 3.5 stars I think is totally fair.