Welcome to the first Why I Love Horror essay of 31 Days of Horror 2025. Today I am featuring Nat Cassidy. Why is he first and today? Many reasons.
First, Nat is a readalike for Clay McLeod Chapman in WHY I LOVE HORROR: ESSAYS ON HORROR LITERATURE, and this year, I am featuring a few of the readalike authors here on the blog.
Second, Nat is the author of one of the best Horror books released this year. Not so far. This year, end stop. I have enjoyed all of Nat's books but When the Wolf Comes Home is his best so far.
I have a lot more to say about it at this link from my Library Journal starred review, but here is a preview of what you can find there.
Three Words That Describe This Book: the power of fear, immersive terror, pulp homage
After a particularly bad day at work at a 24-hour LA diner, aspiring actress Jess finds a young boy whimpering outside her apartment complex and brings him inside. But this is no ordinary boy, and the father who is looking for him is a monster who will stop at nothing to get him back. So opens Cassidy’s latest Horror novel (his best to date), as he consciously frames his story about “daddy issues” as an homage to classic pulp Horror and chase novels with clear Twilight Zone influences, but this description only scratches the surface. Full of action, adventure, blood, and twists, the tale is anchored by the evolving relationship between Jess and the kiddo, who are the beating heart at its terrifying center. Reader beware, as the text warns, “No one will be spared,” but not in the way anyone will anticipate. The horrors encountered here will burrow much deeper, forcing a confrontation with the power fear holds over all.
Nat also graciously agreed to do an interview with me in LJ to be paired with that review. You can access our conversation here.
Third, today is Yom Kippur. I wrote this post a few days ago and set it to run today. I will not be online as I observe the most important Jewish Holiday of the year. Nat himself is Jewish and he wrote about it in the afterward for Nestlings and how his Judaism made its way into the story. Click here (and scroll down) to read my review of Nestlings where I write about this in more detail.
Thank you to Nat for not only agreeing to write an essay for this year's 31 Days of Horror but also for managing to both make his writing style and personality shine and still give us a serious look at Horror. This is funny on the surface, but the second you start thinking about the words, you realize it hits much deeper.
Take it away Nat Cassidy.
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WHY I LOVE HRUH
By Nat Cassidy
Roughly 135,000 years ago, a young hominid named Hruh lived amongst a tiny, isolated clan deep in the wilderness.
Hruh was an imaginative, anxious fellow and, much to the chagrin of his small community, he voiced those imaginative anxieties to everyone within earshot. He would think of the worst case scenario—worse than worst, because he would embellish details, exaggerate threats—and then inflict the what-ifs upon his mother, his father, his siblings, his cousins.
It had been this way ever since he first learned to communicate. It didn’t win him any friends. He was often, to borrow a later parlance, on thin fucking ice.
In fact, his name meant something like nuisance, annoyance. It had come from the squealing noises he’d made as a baby, but as any of his family would have attested, the morbid ramblings he spouted off once he got a little older were no less obnoxious than his infant shrieks.
No one wanted to hear it. They cursed the very existence of their limited language for making Hruh’s awful stories possible. You’re making us worry about things that don’t even exist, they’d say (and I’m paraphrasing here). The world is scary enough! Leave those obnoxious details out of it. It’s not useful!
Useful was the most important concept to Hruh’s family. They didn’t have these particular words to describe themselves, but his was a family of stubborn rationalists. A peculiar breed that has been with our species since time immemorial. One that puts no value on the ephemeral.
Hruh couldn’t help himself. He’d never admit it, but a deep, intrinsic part of him actually enjoyed the sensation of jumping at shadows, of causing alarm in others, of looking into the dark recesses of a cave system or a copse of trees and imagining the most hideous breeds of creatures his mind could conjure and then being weirdly relieved when reality served up something a little less insane. It was fun. And it was useful. He didn’t know how, but it was.
Then one day, the monster arrived.
Something somehow none of them had ever seen before.
A massive—they didn’t quite have the word for it, but let’s say cat. With two gigantic teeth the size of a grown man’s forearm jutting out of its skull. And a horrible case of mange, which had rendered its face, neck, and head completely hairless. It was a truly abominable, uncanny sight. Very much like something Hruh’s feverish imagination would’ve conjured up. It glided into Hruh’s family’s cave with silky grace, unhurried, a low and almost hypnotic bass note churning in its throat.
Practically each member of Hruh’s clan had the same response when they saw this abomination: they were stunned into stillness. Their brains were like a narrow entryway, trying to admit too many new thoughts in at the same time, causing a pile up at the threshold.
Hruh’s brother tried to put up a fight, but he was quickly dispatched by one of the monster’s massive incisors. After that, everyone else seemed to accept their fate almost immediately. Only their bowels and bladders had sense enough to run.
Some 134,947 years later, a British writer named Richard Adams would name the sensation tharn (which, incidentally, was Hruh’s clan’s word for a small, purplish berry that should only be eaten when one’s bowels moved stubbornly slow). Hruh would never get the chance to read Richard Adams—a shame, since everyone should give him a try—but he would’ve recognized the concept of tharn immediately. He saw it embodied with every one of his clansmen.
Not him, though. The freakish, naked tooth-cat inspired no such reaction in him.
Because Hruh’s first though of seeing this creature, hearing its rumble, seeing the way the shadows of the cave and their small fires twisted and warped the animal’s already terrifying features, was:
I’ve been here before.
He experienced no overwhelming, circuit-frying novelty. He simply recognized the threat for what it was. He’d played out scenarios like this again and again in his mind. He was afraid, but fear was nothing new to him. He knew how to live alongside it.
Fear had also shown him every place in the caves where he could hide during such an incident as this. He was able to stay safe as the beast slinked past, tore the others apart, and eventually left.
It all happened so quickly.
He was the only survivor.
After leaving the mangled remains of his clan—and I suppose it should be said he did feel bad about not being able to save them—Hruh eventually went on to find a new community.
He wandered far, and one day found others who were like him, who weren’t afraid of fear, who leaned into the even-worse-worst-case-scenarios, who found themselves comforted by the darkest imaginings. Hruh was determined to keep his new clan safe, to not make the mistakes his previous family made. He made story-sharing a priority. Every night—and sometimes during the day.
The darker the better.
The scarier the better.
The more useful.
It became a tradition. A skill.
And his children lived on.
***
Lately, I’ve been formulating a hypothesis.
Horror, as a genre, is such a massive tent. We’ve got invisible demons rubbing shoulders with city-sized monsters while unkillable masked slashers shoot the shit with mournful ghosts. It’s a fool’s errand to make too many generalizations.
But my hypothesis is a generalization. And a pretty accurate one at that, I’d wager.
Here it is.
I think almost every horror fan—and this includes horror creators, since all of us come to the genre as fans first; why else would we own so many black t-shirts with Dario Argento titles on them?—possesses two distinct personality traits.
First, we’re all anxious as hell. We all tend to imagine how things can go wrong. We walk into a room and we’re automatically writing the first draft of some new Final Destination-type movie in our head: here’s what could kill me, here’s what could maim me, here’s where a masked psycho could hide, here’s how I could embarrass myself, here’s how my heart could break. The world is an amusement park map, only it’s full of emotional and physical peril instead of rides.
That’s a big part of why we love our genre so much, after all. Horror stories give us such satisfying confirmation. I was right! we get to think. See?! THAT’S why I never go upstairs / into the ocean / near abandoned lunatic asylums / home to visit my parents!
As a little bonus, we get to feel some justifiable bravery, too. Because, this time, we chose the danger. We didn’t wait for it to come to us. We bought the ticket. We opened the book. You don’t get to rule my life, Fear.
Horror lovers know anxiety like their closest (though not always dearest) friend. But there are plenty of people who are naturally anxious, and a lot of them hate horror. They say things like, Why would I ever want to watch or read something that scares me? The world is scary enough as it is!
That’s where the second trait comes into play. The trait that truly sets us horror fans—the children of Hruh—apart.
We’re all optimists. Whether we’re aware of it or not.
This doesn’t necessarily mean we think good things will happen. But I do think it means we all think good things are possible.
The anxious people who don’t like horror don’t like horror because it only reminds them that bad things happen, with no additional benefit. But every time a horror fan engages with a horror story? A deep, primal part of our brain kicks in, one that thinks (and I’m paraphrasing here), Okay, then how would *I* survive in this scenario? What mistakes do the characters make? What do they do right?
How can I use this?
Sure, the kills are fun. The dread is delicious. We get a little twisted kick out of the taboo-pushing.
But it’s also all useful.
Horror fans love life. We love living. We understand there is no true horror in a story unless the thing at risk of being lost is precious. We believe survival is always possible, even if it’s only the remotest possibility. And that’s why, night after night, our clan gathers around the fire, to share these stories of failed survivorship, of heightened peril, of gruesome, garish torment.
Because we’d like to keep on surviving, thank you very much.
We are the children of Hruh, after all.
It’s in our DNA.
***
By the way, you might like to know that Hruh lived a long, long life and died at the ripe old age of 35.
Anthropological records show he might have even been working on one dilly of a cave painting. Something involving small town secrets, plucky children, and maybe even a killer trickster with a white face and orange puffy hair (but I’m paraphrasing here).
He’d never know the legacy he’d leave behind.
All the imaginings his lineage would conjure forth and inflict upon their stubbornly rational, appalled brethren with morbid glee.
Hruh went on to have a long line of inheritors.
One of them is me.
One of them is you.
***
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