Well, someone had to do it eventually. Some author featured in this column Your Favorite Author’s Favorite Author had to go and pick one of the biggest (if not THE biggest names in literature) as the author they wanted to chat with me about at length. But who would be mad enough to do such a thing? Who could speak about a certain English playwright and poet with warmth, affection, and a palpable appreciation that registers intellectually, emotionally, and soulfully?

None other than Nat Cassidy. Nat Cassidy writes horror for the page, stage, and screen. His acclaimed novels, including Mary: An Awakening of Terror and Nestlings, have been featured in best-of lists from Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, NPR, the Chicago Review of Books, the NY Public Library, and more, and he was named one of the "writers shaping horror’s next golden age" by Esquire. His award-winning horror plays have been produced throughout New York City and across the United States. He won the NY Innovative Theatre Award for his one-man show about H. P. Lovecraft, another for his play about Caligula, and was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write the libretto for a short opera (about the end of the world, of course). You've also maybe seen Nat on your TV, playing various Bad Guys of the Week on shows such as Law & Order: SVU, Blue Bloods, Bull, Quantico, FBI, and many others ... but that's a topic for a different interview. He lives in New York City with his wife.

And with all of that on his plate, he still had the time to wax poetic about his favorite author, sharing insights that had me reaching for my copy of the Norton’s Shakespeare to double-check my notes—and to likely add a few of Nat’s notations to the mix as well.

Who is your favorite author and why?

Watch your toes, everybody; I’m gonna drop the biggest name I can. My favorite author is the Bard himself. Mr. William “Drama G.O.A.T.” Shakespeare. And why? I dunno, is the timeless poetry enough? The beautifully realized characters? The iconic stories? The foundational, revolutionary approach to dynamic storytelling? The seamless fusion of comedy and drama and the supernatural and the slapstick and the absurd and the heart-wrenching and the pathos and the bathos and the history and the immediacy and and and? I’ll stop being so damned cheeky and be more specific. But I love the guy, okay?

When were you first made aware of this author and when were you first drawn to their work?

I first became obsessed with Shakespeare when I was around six years old. By that point, I was already a morbid, horror-loving kid. I was also—unrelatedly—very difficult, hyperactive, and disruptive. My first grade teacher and I haaaaated each other. But one day, she showed our class some slides from a recent trip to Greece and one of the photos was of an amphitheater where she saw a production of Macbeth. No idea why she then started telling this class of children the plot to Macbeth, but to her credit she noticed how I stopped setting fires and carving swear words into school property for a moment to actually listen to her recount this story about ghosts and witches and regicide. Afterwards, she literally challenged me to read the whole play, and, not one to turn down a challenge from my nemesis, I did. My mom and I read it together over many evenings and I’ve been hooked ever since. From there, I read the other more-horror-and/or-supernaturally-coded plays (Hamlet, Lear, Othello, the Tempest, Midsummer, Titus, etc.). I even read Timon of Athens early on because the edition of the Collected Works I had featured woodcuts before each script and the one for Timon looked like it was about a sasquatch or something (sadly, it wasn’t, but it’s still pretty good). I also read books like Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which retell many of the plays for a younger audience. I only mention that, because, it should definitely be said, a TON of the material went way over my head at the time. I will always maintain that Shakespeare is far easier to understand than his reputation might prepare people for, but come on. I was still a kid.

I was a precocious little child actor at the time, too, and within a couple years, I was doing everything I could to be in any local productions of Shakespeare, as well. That sort of work was equally as important to helping me understand the texts at first.

As an actor, did you feel a particular connection with the words from that perspective? Obviously, there does seem to be a timelessness and universality to Shakespeare’s word choice, turns of phrase, etc., as you touch upon above. But I have often wondered if, from an actor’s perspective, there is something particularly resonant in Shakespeare’s work and, if so, how that might be described?

Oh, god, absolutely. The words feel like candy in your mouth—or, no, not like candy. Candy is insubstantial. Nutritionless. Shakespeare’s words feel like the best steak you’ve ever had, the best grilled vegetables you’ve ever had, whatever other metaphor fits your dietary persuasion. I mean, one of the reasons iambic pentameter is the default verse form is because it’s so damn satisfying to deliver (also so much easier to memorize). That’s not even factoring in the great lines, the witty ripostes, the poignant poetry, the rhyming couplets, the collaborative electricity when you’re pinging off another actor / group of actors, making the scene crackle. Doing Shakespeare can be addictive; it’s just such a tactile joy. But that’s also one of its biggest pitfalls. An actor can fall in love with the sound of their own voice doing Shakespeare and it can lead to cliched, stentorian, artificial deliveries. Which is why one of my favorite things to do, blasphemous though it might be, is fuck with the rhythm and melody whenever I can, especially if it’s a particularly famous passage. (I’ll never forget doing Hamlet one time and beginning “To be or not to be,” only for an elderly woman in the audience to lean over to her husband and say, in as loud a voice as only an elderly theater patron can muster, “I KNOW THIS SPEECH.” It kinda made me determined to never let my delivery get too predictable or familiar whenever I can help it.)

Is there one particular piece of work from this author that you are especially fond of or that’s had a significant creative impact on you? What is that piece and what makes it so appealing or affecting for you?

Maybe the most wonderful thing about Shakespeare is that not only is it common to have your “favorite” play change over the course of your life, it’s actually a vital part of the experience. Different aspects of different stories and characters suddenly resonate with you in ways they never did before. When I was a kid, of course, I was ALL about Macbeth and Midsummer. They were the biggest, splashiest, creepiest, funniest plays, and, thus, the height of entertainment. Then, in adolescence, naturally I started being more interested in stories like Romeo & Juliet and Othello. At the same time, as I was growing more ambitious as a young actor, the title roles in Hamlet, Henry V, and Richard III became THE MOST IMPORTANT ROLES IMAGINABLE.

Then, in my early 20s, in a little more of a nihilistic mood, I was all about King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus & Cressida, but also the finely tuned comedic stylings of As You Like It and Twelfth Night. When I became more invested in my identity as a horror playwright, I fell in love hard with the Henry VIs for all their messiness. Now, though, I think I get the most out of plays like Henry IV, Parts One and Two, or The Winter's Tale, or even The Tempest (a play I used to kinda hate). Stories that are about change, about the bittersweetness of aging and loss. It’s not that those previously mentioned stories have any less value for me now, though; more that new resonances keep opening up every time I revisit the other texts. One of the many reasons Shakespeare is so timeless is that he grows with you, and you with him.

So much good stuff to pick from above… as someone who has a tattoo of Prince Hal’s “Yet herein will I imitate the sun…” from Henry IV, Part One, I have to concur with that as a favorite. But I’m most curious about why The Tempest was previously hated. It would seem to have many of the elements that you admired in Macbeth and Midsummer: magic, strange creatures, plotting, treachery, etc. Can you speak to the differences you find in how those elements are presented in The Tempest and why it might have taken you longer to appreciate the play?

Oh, that’s so awesome about the Hal tattoo! I love that speech. And also, how intriguing: who’s the REAL Patrick Barb, if you’re smothering up your true beauty while hanging out with us jokers and ruffians?? (Don’t answer; we’ll find out when you’re king.) As for The Tempest, my answer’s pretty dumb. I basically just thought it was too boring when I was younger. It has all these great, magical elements, and this fascinating counterpoint between Ariel and Caliban. But I wanted battles! I wanted violence! I wanted Prospero to get his revenge! I wanted the wizard version of Titus Andronicus! But by this point in his career—The Tempest is one of his final plays, for those who don’t know—Shakespeare wasn’t interested in things like that. As with the other plays of this period of his life, it’s a work about forgiveness, about emotional distances traveled, about reconnection, about melancholy goodbyes to former ways of living. I eat that kinda stuff up now, but back then it felt like a dramatic failure. (Incidentally, I think that’s one of the reasons I love Henry IV so much. It’s not quite in the exact middle of his professional chronology, but it almost feels like a fulcrum point between all his impulses: the immature, pulpy stuff, the comedies, the tragedies, the romances. It’s got it all.)

How often do you revisit that particular piece or the author’s work in general? What lessons have you learned at various times from the work?

Just by virtue of being an actor, I usually find myself doing a staged reading or two of at least one Shakespeare play a year. But even if it’s the rare year where that doesn’t happen, I try to pick one off the shelf every now and then and fall in love with a turn of phrase or a characterization choice. I love to listen to audio recordings of various performances, too—there are great ones out there, and I find listening to them to be weirdly comforting.

I’d be remiss if I also didn’t mention that, almost as much as Shakespeare’s works themselves, I’ve always loved reading analyses and scholarship about them. So, I’ll often pick up one of my well-read copies of A.C. Bradley, of Marjorie Garbor, of Harold Bloom, William Hazlitt, James Shapiro, Stephen Grenblatt, Harold Clarke Goddard, Mark van Doren,, et al., and read some insights about a particular story or character. Even if I don’t agree with the interpretation, it always gets me thinking about layers and themes and character arcs and archetypes and things like that, which I find super inspiring, especially if I’m in the middle of writing something of my own. It makes me want to create something worthy of that kind of attention.

Even when you’re approaching Shakespeare’s work as an actor, reader, audience member, etc., are there parts of the writer's side of your brain that are activated? Obviously, his influence on prose writing is well-documented (well, hello there, William Faulkner…), but I’m curious on an individual level if there are instances where you’ve sparked with something from the Bard that’s ended up in your own prose?

Hugely. One key writing lesson from Shakespeare, no matter what medium you’re working in, can be found in his balancing of prose and verse. In almost every play, there’s a mixture of both: some entire scenes are written in iambic pentameter, some are written only in prose, some switch off in the middle, some characters decide to suddenly change tactics, etc. It’s always a choice, never an accident. Richard II is entirely in verse; Merry Wives of Windsor is like 90% prose–what does that tell us about the worlds of those particular plays, and what subtle effects does it have on the audience? What does it tell us when a character switches it up? What does it tell us when one character finishes another’s pentametric line? Or when Romeo and Juliet compose a sonnet with their dialogue? Paying attention to stuff like that, specifically as a writer, teaches you the importance of deliberate style and strategic variation. It sounds almost too obvious to be worth saying, but the musicality of words is vital metadata. It informs the audience, whether reader or listener, of certain essential dynamics. It induces certain essential feelings. Find ways to switch up your rhythms, your flows. Use varying sentence lengths. Use stichomythia. Use patterns. Interrupt patterns. But never arbitrarily–always in service of the scenes and interactions you’re creating. Be deliberate.

Beyond stuff like that, sometimes it’s also just impossible to not throw in a few direct references to Shakespearean turns of phrase. Just as a fer’instance, in my book Mary, there’s a serial killer who comes from a very theatrical background and who’s taught he’s basically life’s Main Character. So, of course, he constantly evokes refrains from Hamlet (specifically that he is “the observed of all observers”).

Are there any pieces in the author’s oeuvre that have not worked as well for you? If yes, which ones and why do you think that connection was not as strong?

Oh my god, SO MANY. I mean, we’ve gotta be honest: there are a lot of super problematic plays in the Collected Works. And one thing I find interesting is some, like Merchant of Venice or Taming of the Shrew, have problematic frames full of flashes of the universal, humanistic genius that show Shakespeare at his most timeless and valuable. He gives us fascinating, full-bodied characters in Shylock, in Kate, but the dramaturgical expectations of the time mean that those characters are in plays that absolutely will not allow them to succeed (and, in fact, we’re expected to laugh at their failures, even though the playwright has presented them in almost anachronistically sympathetic ways). And then, on the other hand, there are plays, like Measure for Measure or All’s Well That Ends Well, that DON’T have problematic frames and would probably be far more timeless than they are, but Shakespeare injects really problematic plot devices into them (ie, the “bed trick”). So, obviously, no writer is without flaws, biases, or contemporary pitfalls—sometimes you see him fighting valiantly to transcend the shortcomings of his day, other times you see him diving headfirst into them. But on the whole, considering these texts are almost 400 years old, they’ve aged remarkably well.

Horror is a genre that’s had its fair share of problematic elements in stories and from the creators themselves. Same could be said for works in other speculative genres as well. Heck, in all of fiction even! Without making a value judgment of those creators and their works relative to the Bard’s Collected Works, do you approach these pieces with a similar eye to identifying strengths and finding what still works within them? All of which is a long way to ask how or if reading Shakespeare has impacted the way you read and experience other creators?

Man, I have so many thoughts about this. The first answer my mind goes to is an impulse I had to, if not unlearn, then at least learn better how to manage. It took me many years as a playwright to notice how uncomfortable I was with revising and editing my own work. Obviously, every writer has their own personal struggles with revisions, no one wants to kill their babies, etc.—but for me, it was something a little more . . . specific. I realized that I was too used to working in classical theatre, where you’re literally not able to fixproblem spots and, instead, have to learn how to justify them.

Does that make sense? It’s like, when working with classical texts, if you bump up against an awkward character moment, or an unrealistic emotional turn, or an unsatisfying ending, you rarely have the ability or opportunity to rewrite it. You can cut it, or you can occasionally add lines from another play (I once was in a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, a fun play with a very poorly executed climax, and the director cleverly inserted some dialogue from Measure for Measure into the weak spots to try to help justify the character turns), but if it’s a particularly famous play; or if you’re trying to maintain fidelity to the experience, you have to instead figure out how to make what doesn’t work, work. Either with acting choices, or with directing flourishes, or something else entirely. Sometimes, these challenges are part of the fun—why does Hamlet treat Ophelia so cruelly (and is he genuinely apologetic afterward), what’s going on in Lear’s mind in that first scene, what does Iago really want, etc. Sometimes it’s an impossible task—how does any actor make Leontes work, or Edgar? But each time, you always wind up thinking, “God, this would be so much easier if there was, like, one more scene, or one more line that gave us just a little more insight, or addressed a dramaturgical question.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying: when I was producing/directing my own material, whenever I’d bump up against something that wasn’t quite working, it took years before I realized, “Oh, I can just rip the guts out of this and re-attack the scene.” I was SO trained to think, “No, the text is sacred; it’s the production’s job to find a way to make it work.” Now, as a more mature, experienced writer, I fucking LOVE rewrites. I’ll keep ripping the guts out of my texts until my editor literally pries it out of my hands (that is, sends me a sternly written email that I have to stop tinkering). And I also love creating or experiencing moments of deliberate withholding—purposefully allowing a moment to be unresolved or mysterious to ensure those fun challenges still remain where I want them to appear.

But does this observation carry further, beyond structurally “imperfect” writing and into problematic content? I think so. Again, I’ll bring up Merchant of Venice. As a Jew myself, I find the entire last act of that play to be almost unbearably painful. The “heroes” of the play absolutely demolish Shylock’s life, take away his daughter, his livelihood, half his net worth, AND make him forcibly convert, and a modern audience feels like they’ve just watched the climax of some complicated, important tragedy . . . BUT THEN there’s an entire, long-ass scene where Shakespeare tries to get those same “heroes” to have this happy, victorious ending, celebrating what they just did! Sure, Shylock did some shitty things, but Shakespeare does almost TOO good a job of humanizing him, voicing his justifications, and to see him punished so brutally, on such a technicality, only to realize that both the writer and his audience wouldn’t have found that punishment upsetting enough to derail his frothy little rom-com is just . . . ugh, it’s awful. It can’t not remind you that Shylock’s humanization as a dramatic character was just a novelty. To Shakespeare’s audience, it would’ve been like humanizing a Martian (they’d likely never even seen a Jew before; Jews had been expelled from England for centuries and it was illegal to practice Judaism there until 1655).

It’d be so easy, almost tempting, then to put that entire damn play on a shelf forever, right? But there’s too much about it that’s too good, too valuable, too powerful. Imagine not having “the quality of mercy;” imagine not having “hath not a Jew eyes.” So in a way, its biggest pitfalls have to become an asset. The play stands as an important historical document. And a reminder that even the most humanistic, empathetic people can have their blind spots.

I’ve seen productions that really lean into those final, uncomfortable scenes and hammer home how awful they should feel to a modern audience. They embrace the text’s biggest flaw; use it to make the play about something bigger than it had been intended to be. (In a very real way, I tried to do something similar with Mary, purposefully including a lot of common misogynistic tropes and language early on, in order for them to be re-examined as the story goes on.) Such can be the value of problematic art. Again, as with the prose/verse stuff, it all comes back to being deliberate.

Good lord, what a ridiculously long answer. Sorry about that. Like I said, I have a lot of thoughts.

What writing lessons have you taken, purposefully or accidentally, from your favorite author?

The biggest lesson, I think, is “Let your characters change.” And, in fact, that should be read not as a suggestion but an imperative. Stories must be grounded in character and that character must undergo some sort of change through the course of the story. In fact, it’s that change itself that is ultimately the story you’re telling, not the external plot dynamics around it. I see Shakespeare very much in line with my other favorite author, Stephen King, and I think on this approach to storytelling, they’re very much aligned: character first.

The second biggest lesson from Shakespeare is you’re never too literate, too esteemed, too high-falutin, too poetic to have some good fart jokes and violence in there, as well.

Very happy to see you bring up King. I think the “character first” approach is certainly shared by both writers.  Do you also see some King parallels with the second biggest lesson you cite? Like Shakespeare, I think King does a great job of playing to the balcony and the groundlings. When you’re starting a new work, how do you approach the idea of “the audience”? Is it a moving target? Something shifting from chapter to chapter, sentence to sentence? What does that balancing act look like for you?

Oh, for sure! I think King embodies both lessons—although, maybe in his case, it’s the reverse? His books are never too pulpy, too gory, too—as he’s called them—“Big Mac and fries,” to not also contain some gorgeous prose and valuable, profound insights into life and the human condition. He’s a much more literary writer than he’ll ever get credit for, and even his least assuming works have an immense amount of craft and merit.

As for “the audience,” it’s a tricky thing. I think any time you explicitly start trying to play to an audience, something gets corrupted. Sometimes, those corruptions are unavoidable (think, for instance, of the beautiful subtleties an actor has to lose when projecting their voice to reach the cheap seats), but other times they’re, as you so rightly put it, just a balancing act. I think the real trick is to think of those ostensibly separate audiences as parts of yourself, and then try to satisfy the inner, personal versions, instead of lusting for the approval of the external ones. What sort of beautiful prose do I like? What sort of fart jokes do I like? That way you’re still staying true to yourself. (I think Shakespeare might’ve even written a line about how important that is somewhere . . .)

Are there any works in your bibliography that you feel are closest to the work of your favorite—whether in terms of style, subject matter, length, etc.? Talk a little about those similarities.

As a playwright, his influence is everywhere in my work. I have two plays in particular that are explicitly about Shakespeare: one called The Reckoning of Kit & Little Boots, which is a sort of “metaphysical buddy comedy” starring Christopher Marlowe (Shakespeare’s early contemporary) and Caligula, where Shakespeare is a character; and another called Old Familiar Faces, which is a love story about four characters (two of whom are the aforementioned Charles and Mary Lamb) who use Shakespeare to help them cope with mental illness.

As a novelist, though, you can see Shakespeare’s influence on me in any story that centers a character’s journey, that combines genres, that shows me trying to “write words good.” Mary, Nestlings, Rest Stop, When the Wolf Comes Home, all of my books come from that character-first place.

Where does your writing diverge from your favorite author’s? Are there any elements from your favorite author’s work that you would like to incorporate in your own? If yes, what are these?

There are certain dramaturgical lessons from Shakespeare I had to unlearn, especially as a playwright. The way he breaks a scene is often a little too slow and ponderous for our current tastes. His style of theatre also allows for too long a run-time and too many characters, both of which are, if not disqualifying, incredibly difficult to pull off these days for purely logistical reasons. But that’s all superficial marketplace sorta stuff. There’s still an honesty, a timeless truth about human messiness Shakespeare captures that I’m always trying to find with my own work. Even in my novel writing, I often think of it in terms of “would someone want to bite into this character as a performer?” I try to make my roles actor-worthy, whether or not it’s actually a script. Or sometimes I’ll think of moments more visually: “Would this scene hold up if someone tried to capture it in a line drawing or a painting or one of those woodcuts that captured my attention as a kid?” There’s an iconic dynamism to Shakespeare that I think is an important thing to always keep in mind.

Talk a bit more about writing characters from a performer’s perspective. What are the key elements you might look to include? Additionally, to flip the script a bit, which of Shakespeare’s characters do you think would most effectively lend themselves to the novel medium?

It always comes down to one major question to me: “Would this be worth someone’s time?” If I’m writing a play, for every single role I put into it, I can’t not be aware of the fact that a busy human being is going to have to give up their time for rehearsals, their ability to take any other jobs, their entire evening for each and every performance, in order to then make that role a reality. And that means, even if a role is functionally very small, and if there’s no way to justify cutting it but also no way to justify making it a more prominent experience, you still have to give that actor something. Some reason to give up that time, something fun or memorable to do. An especially good laugh-line, a juicy scene, a vibrant backstory, a wild costume, an elaborate death, SOMETHING. Obviously, as a novelist, those same concerns aren’t quite so practical, but I still find myself thinking, any time I bring a new character into the narrative, what about this person is interesting or memorable or unique? Sometimes, it’s just the difference between writing “the cashier” versus “the cashier with sad eyes” or “the cashier with a mustard stain on his collar.” Just a little something for the imaginary actor, so when they’re asked what the book is about by their friends, they can say, “It’s about a cashier who keeps spilling mustard on his shirt and is sad about it.”

As for which Shakespearean character would do best in a novel, the first thing I think of is that there’s a novel about Lady Macbeth that I desperately wanna read and hear is really great. [Interviewer’s note: I believe Nat’s referring to Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid here.] There’s also a great John Updike novel called Gertrude and Claudius that I loved when I first read it many years ago. It’s tempting to say I want an American Psycho-esque dive into Iago’s psyche, but that also feels kinda redundant, like one of those live-action remakes of an animated Disney movie that already works perfectly as is. I probably shouldn’t say this, because it’s something I want to do and don’t want anyone to steal my idea, but I’ve always wanted to tell a skewed version of Hamlet where you find out Horatio is actually an Iago-type villain who’s been orchestrating all the chaos in order to overthrow the Danish government. (I even tease this idea out a little further in the current book I’m writing, so hopefully I can actually do the real thing one of these days soon. The last production of Hamlet I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about how to pull this idea off—I’m totally in love with it.)

Or, ooo! How about this? How about a novel that imagines every unnamed Messenger character in every History play is actually the same person, living through multiple disastrous reigns of kings? Let’s hear their story!

If a reader wanted to start reading your favorite author, what piece would you recommend they start with?

“There’s the rub,” to quote the big man himself. I would recommend NOT reading him at all, but instead attending a well-reviewed production, listening to an audio recording, or watching a good film adaptation. I know this is kind of ironic considering my Shakespeare origin story, but I think our educational system does a great disservice by making young students read Shakespeare. These plays weren’t meant to be read—the only reason they were written down and published in the first place was because that was the only way to capture and proliferate them at the time.

I always try to remind anyone who’s turned off by the idea of Shakespeare that these plays weren’t written for English Lit professors, they were written for a drunken, rowdy audience of illiterates who did not treat boring entertainment kindly. We may have a little more communal ADHD than those audiences, but our fundamental hungers as audiences really aren’t any different. Sadly, a lot of the simplicity of these plays can be lost in reading the often poetic syntax on the page. But if you can find a good Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Henry IV, Midsummer, Twelfth Night, etc., you’ll see what the fuss is about. I’m not mentioning specific productions or films here because your mileage may vary, but what defines “good” to me? Fast paced, embracing the humor, not taking itself too seriously, but always honoring the stakes of the story.

(Side note: I’ve got nothing against productions that tweak some of the language or rearrange the text, either. I’ve worked a lot with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which embarked on a light ‘translation’ project of each play, making them more accessible to first-time audiences. And, to this day, the best production of Macbeth I’ve ever seen basically Pulp Fiction-ed the entire structure and rearranged scenes in an entirely new order. I love that shit. Anything that makes these incredible characters and stories pop for a contemporary audience, I’m all for.)

If you could ask your favorite author one question about their work, what would it be?

“Can you believe there are weirdos who think the fucking Earl of Oxford wrote all your stuff?”

What do you have coming out next on the writing and publishing front? What are you working on now?

On the publishing front: I’ve got a novella called Rest Stop that will be out by October 15th of this year through Shortwave Publishing. It’s a nasty, splatterpunk-y little story that is kinda like Green Room meets Gerald’s Game. And my next novel with Tor Nightfire hits shelves in April 2025, called When the Wolf Comes Home. I cannot wait for people to read it; it’s an action-horror-thriller that’s sort of a combination of Firestarter, It, Ursula K. LeGuin, The Twilight Zone, and, like, early Dean Koontz potboilers. It’s also about fathers, and the nature of fear, and the differences between being a frightened adult versus a frightened child. It’s maybe my favorite thing I’ve written yet. Please, please, please consider preordering it! (It’s also gonna be available in the UK through Titan, if you’re, like William Shakespeare, on t’other side of the Atlantic.)

On the writing front: I’m about 25K words into my NEXT next novel with Nightfire. I’m super excited about it . . . but I’m not gonna tell you about it yet! You gotta preorder Wolf and Rest Stop first!

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me about your favorite author.

Where can readers find you online?

Thank YOU! What an absolute pleasure this has been! You can find me pretty much everywhere (IG and Threads: @catnassidy. Everywhere else: @natcassidy.) Although, I’ve become something of a post-and-ghost-er. I find it very easy to get addicted to social media, so if I stick around on any one site for too long, I’ll get nothing else done.