Festival Feature: Cassidy – Taking Power Over Fear
September 20, 2025
NOTE: A version of this story appears in our 2025 South Dakota Festival of Books guide, produced by South Dakota Magazine. Nat Cassidy, who was described by Esquire as “one of the best horror writers of this generation,” will discuss his work at the Festival of Books, Sept. 26-28 in Spearfish.
As a kid, Nat Cassidy was often carrying a Stephen King novel. Or a William Shakespeare play. Sometimes both. “I got to experience the different reactions that adults would have, seeing a kid with either a horror book or something they deemed to be a ‘classic,’” Cassidy says. “Even though both authors were dealing with the same things. Stephen King and Shakespeare are equally as gory and humanistic and existential.”
That centuries-spanning mashup of modern horror and classical playwrighting helped make Cassidy who he is today — a successful writer of horror for the page, stage and screen. His latest novel is When the Wolf Comes Home, a fast-paced thriller about a little boy with the ability to manifest his fears into reality and the malcontent struggling actress/waitress who becomes his unwitting caretaker.
Cassidy grew up in what he calls a “fiction supportive household.” Their shelves were lined with books by King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub and other horror heavy hitters of the 1990s. He took his first stab at horror writing as a teenager. The seed for When the Wolf Comes Home was planted then, but after setting it aside for decades, Cassidy returned to it with a more mature perspective on the story and the genre. “This story started to clarify itself,” he says. “It’s about shape shifting, mixing werewolves with archetypal dark fairy tale motifs. I realized I could write a sort of long form exegesis about the nature of fear, specifically the differences between adult fear and child fear.”
So who would love such a story and why? “The ideal horror fan is someone who is naturally anxious but also maybe unexpectedly optimistic,” he says. “When you engage with a horror story, you’re taking fear into your own power. You’re saying, ‘I know there are bad things out there, but I’m not going to wait for it come to me. I’m going to seek it out and maybe become stronger through experiencing it voluntarily.’ There’s a certain kind of reader who gets a lot out of that. I know I’m one of them.”
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