Interview: Nat Cassidy – Nightmare Magazine

Nat Cassidy writes horror for the page, stage, and screen.

His acclaimed novels, including Mary: An Awakening of Terror, Nestlings, and Rest Stop, have been featured in best-of lists from Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, NPR, the Chicago Review of Books, the NY Public Library, Amazon, and more, and he was named one of the “writers shaping horror’s next golden age” by Esquire. His latest novel, The Wolf Comes Home, came out on April 22nd.

What was your initial exposure to horror? Maybe the best way to ask this is when did horror find you? What were the movies/books/etc. that really got you into the genre?

I guess my initial exposure to horror was that first moment I realized I was a conscious entity born into a temporary vessel fated to slowly break down in unpredictable ways before dumping my senses into an obscure chasm from which no other living organism has reliably returned to report back what to expect. Also, my mom read a lot of Stephen King while I was growing up and I wanted to be like her.

As with Mary and Nestlings, The Wolf Comes Home follows a pattern in which you write these moving afterwords describing how personal these novels are to you. In turn, you also make it personal for the reader, too. I think a lot of people can identify with the themes you talk about in those afterwords. What is it about horror in particular that you think makes it a good vehicle for these heavy themes?

Horror, to me, is more than a collection of genre tropes; it’s a philosophy. Telling horror stories allows us to proactively lay claim to our worst fears, to turn them into something momentarily useful (even if only as entertainment), to willingly go towards feeling unsettled and realize we can survive it, we can learn from it. There’s a morbidly affirmative element to horror stories: they don’t treat you like an idiot for sometimes worrying that Bad Things can happen. One of the reasons I like to include the personal context behind each book is to continue that affirmation. Bad Things do happen. But also, in a very real way, the book can then literally stand as proof: Even if you’re going through a Bad Thing yourself, that Bad Thing doesn’t always get to have the final say.

I really enjoyed the lists of books in you include in each of the afterwords. Other than being excellent reading recommendations, why include them?

Because I love books! Booooooks! Also, I know that, as a reader myself, I always appreciate lists like that. I’m a completist: If I fall in love with a book, I wanna read all the other books that helped make it the way it is. More boooooks!

Your books focus on the family dynamics of your characters and/or the characters around them. Is this a theme that you like to focus on in your work, or is it something that just bubbles up naturally out of the story as you’re writing it?

That’s interesting—I actually haven’t really investigated the frequency of family dynamics in my work yet. I’ll bring it up in therapy and report back. In the meantime, though, I think at least part of it is that I always approach story through character first and every character has a family (or a noticeable lack thereof), so those family relationships become a key element to understanding who the character is. There’s something about family relationships that can flash boil a person down to a very essential version of themselves, which is both fascinating and handy for dramatic purposes.

You make sure each of your characters feel real and relatable. They’re messy, usually come from working-class backgrounds, and most work in the arts or around books. Is that something you focus on when coming up with these characters?

Thank you! I usually spend the first draft of something making sure the plot is laid out and at least semi-coherent, and then every subsequent draft from that point on is almost exclusively about making sure the characters feel real and dimensional and authentic and relatable. It’s the most important thing to me. And as a messy, working-class person who works in the arts myself, I guess I find that demographic to be a comfortable place to start from.

What inspired The Wolf Comes Home? What was the initial idea?

Several streams converging at once: a love of chase stories, a desire to write something action-oriented and with a larger physical map than my previous two location-bound stories (Nestlings and Rest Stop), an early obsession with Terminator 2 and a later obsession with its beautiful story structure . . . and lastly, way back in 1995, there was a TV promo for a brief-lived supernatural drama on CBS called American Gothic. The show itself was really cool, but that one specific ad was spooky as hell and it first gave me the idea for the general dynamics of this story, which stayed in my brain ever since.

In The Wolf Comes Home, there are a lot of imaginary threats that (literally) come to life. How did you go about choosing each threat to make real? And there’s a certain cartoon movie villain appearance early on (one I really don’t want to spoil here) that’s really fun. What made you choose that cartoon?

That [spoiler redaction] scene was one of many, many things that fuuuuucked me up when I was a kid. I could’ve easily used the ending of Superman III or Large Marge from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure instead. I was already a really sensitive, hyperimaginative kid, but for whatever reason, when I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, there was also a raft of movies and shows that were ostensibly for children but had at least one moment of pure, trauma-inducing, high-octane nightmare fuel that came outta nowhere. It was so delightfully irresponsible and left me with a lot of sleepless nights. Now, of course, I’m jaded as hell and long for the days when I could be so affected by something scary—but one of the fun things about this book was remembering what it was like to look at the world through those eyes again. There are terrors everywhere.

The boy in The Wolf Comes Home has some fascinating, interesting powers. What was the inspiration behind them, and how did you create the rules for how they work?

There’s a probably pretty obvious homage in there to the classic story by Jerome Bixby, “It’s a Good Life” (later made famous by its adaptation into a Twilight Zone episode and movie segment). I don’t want to spoil how that inspiration is used in this book—I’ve probably said too much already—but I just love that story and think its premise (and execution) is an all-timer. I could say more about the whys and wherefores, but, again, spoilers. Talk to me about it sometime in person if you wanna.

Both Jess and the boy have an interesting dichotomy with each other, in that she sometimes acts like things are real, and the boy believes they’re real: actor and audience. Is Jess drawing on some acting training to create this illusion?

Absolutely – and more than acting training, it’s Jess’s background in improv comedy that really influences a lot of her decision making. I knew my protagonist was going to face an increasing avalanche of surreal horrors; I wanted her to have a little muscle memory when it comes to receiving the unexpected and just running with it. That said, there are also moments where Jess’s more performative neuroses and impulses only make things drastically worse—maybe as a reminder to myself that theatre training can’t solve everything.

I noticed in both Mary and Nestlings, there’s mention of the same bookstore: Keats & Yeats. Is there a bigger connection between these books, as well as The Wolf Comes Home, or are these fun little nods?

Mary, Nestlings, and Wolf all form a kind of unofficial trilogy, so there are several little connections between all three books. But I have a feeling one day Keats & Yeats will have a story all of its own. It’s an important place, after all. All bookstores are.

Jess is a working actor trying to get auditions and gigs while working at a diner to get by. How close are your experiences as an actor to hers?

Completely different. I’m a working actor trying to get auditions and gigs while working at an office to get by. Zero things in common. (For whatever reason, my entire life, I’ve never been able to get a job in the food service industry. Closest I ever came was as an events cater-waiter, but I barely had anything to do with the food and I only got two shifts before they stopped returning my calls. There’s just something unappetizing about me, I guess.)

You work in many different mediums, from television shows to podcasts to novels. Why choose the novel as the vehicle for these stories? Have they existed in other forms before?

Mary existed first as a book, then a screenplay, then a radioplay, then a book again. Nestlings began as a movie treatment before becoming a book. Wolf began as a (very different) book attempt, then a movie treatment, then the book it ultimately became. When a story starts calling to me, I tend to break it for as many different media as I can—it helps me realize what scenes are necessary, what beats require more examination, and so on. But the novel is ultimately my favorite form, because it’s the most complete and the most expansive. You’re not beholden to budgetary limitations, you can dive into the innermost truths of a moment, you can use the visual layout of words to provide the reader with layers of meaning—there’s really nothing you can’t do.

Did you have any particular challenges writing each of these books?

Yes. Specifically the writing of them. Writing is hard. Each book eventually teaches you how to write it, but each book also likes to throw new challenges at you to make sure you never get to feel like you totally know what you’re doing. I suppose once you lose that dynamic, a big part of the fun dies, right?

Do you have any writing rituals that you used in each of these novels? Were they different book to book?

Are blind panic and existential despair considered a ritual? That’s about the only thing each book has had in common. Mary was an incredibly difficult drafting and composition process, written during moments of black-out sleep deprivation and the beginnings of the pandemic. Nestlings was much easier to outline, but was written during stolen moments amongst a cavalcade of personal losses. Wolf was a relative breeze and mainly written in the early mornings before I reported to my day job. The book I’m currently writing is the hardest, most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted and makes the conditions under which I wrote Nestlings seem like a Swedish massage. The biggest thing I’ve learned is you have to be incredibly stubborn when writing a book. No matter how bad you think that first draft is, and no matter how impossible the scheduling conflicts may seem, you’ve gotta just find whatever time you can get to put even a few words down on the page. Whatever rituals help get those words there are the exact rituals you need.

I first discovered your work on the Steal the Stars podcast (which was incredible, by the way!). You acted in that show and later adapted it into a novel. How did that opportunity come about?

Aw, thank you! A deep cut! I love it when people know about Steal the Stars—I’m very proud of that show, as well as all my work with Gideon Media, the company who made it. (Plug: check out Give Me Away, the latest rich sci-fi epic audiodrama made by the same creative team.) However, a slight correction: I didn’t “later” adapt it as a novel. I adapted it at the same time! We did that show as a coproduction with Tor Books, and the novelization was scheduled to be released concurrently with the airing of the final episode, so I was literally writing the novelization while Mac Rogers, the creator and writer of the show, was writing the scripts, and while we were all piling into the studio to record the damn thing. It was an incredibly intense, compressed experience and I can’t believe we survived it. Ah, youth.

Does having acting experience help your writing? Or vice versa? How do they play off each other, if they do?

Totally! Acting and writing are both essentially just exercises in extreme, long-form empathy and I call on all my theatre training and experience whenever telling a character-based story for any medium. There are all sorts of smaller, more specific lessons, too: what makes a scene interesting, what makes dialogue feel authentic, how to evoke specific emotions, etc. Plus, for whatever it’s worth, a huge percentage of my training and resume are specifically in Shakespearean theatre. I’m as big a Shakespeare nerd as I am a Stephen King nerd—and his work still holds up four hundred years later, so what better examples to learn by?

What’s the best advice you’ve received that relates to both acting and writing?

“‘Style’ is knowing what sort of play you’re in,” John Gielgud. He’s not referring to “style” in the fashion meaning, but “style” as in form, as in approach. Your acting style for a production of Othello will be different from your acting style for a production of School for Scandal, which will be different from Uncle Vanya, which will be different from Noises Off, etc., etc. Good writing similarly needs to have that kind of clarity of purpose. Every time you sit down to write, know what sort of play you’re in.

What’s next for you? Are there any projects you’re working on/coming out with soon that you can talk about?

I’m beyond thrilled and honored to have a story (the penultimate one, no less!) in the landmark anthology, The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, which comes out in August of this year. The Stand is one of the most important books of my life and I make no secret of my broader Stephen King obsessions, so to be in this collection is a real dream come true. My story is a love letter to Stephen King nerds everywhere (but don’t worry, it’s New Reader friendly, as well). Beyond that, I’m about 90% done with the first draft of my next book, which I might be able to talk about sometime soon . . . but not yet!