Book Review: When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy

 

When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy

304 pages, Paperback

Published April 22, 2025 by Tor Nightfire

I admit this is my first time reading Nat Cassidy, and certainly it won't be the last. I realized something dangerous. I feel like I know the guy; we have plenty of mutual friends. I have been listening to Nat on Talking Scared with their Dark Tower series for a while now. I feel like I have gotten to know his taste, and so this is very much like reading a book written by a friend.

The storytelling skill is very smooth, and it may have been influenced by reading it directly after a book that didn’t work for me. This one felt effortlessly written. Like a pure jump shot in hoop, nothing but net.

It was an accident, but I went in cold on the plot, and that helped because major reveals worked perfectly for me. I say accident, as when Nat appeared here in San Diego, I planned to go to the event and hear him talk about the book. The problem was Nat’s website said 7 PM, and even though I know Saturday events at Mysterious Galaxy are typically in the afternoon, and the store is not open. I took the bus across town and showed up at 7 PM. There were two other people as confused as me. They helped me feel less stupid.

When Judge Rothenberg had this on his best of list last year (we do my year-end review together annually on my podcast) I joked that I refused to read it, but the truth is I was planning to buy a copy and it took me a while to get one, after the wrong time event.

None of that matters to you; the question you have is whether this is a good book. This is a spectacular horror novel, with SF elements that put it in a similar vibe to King’s Firestarter or the John Farris classic The Fury. This modern take on those types of stories has to break new ground, and it does, if you want to be completely unspoiled, you have to trust me and stop here.

With the title When the Wolf Comes Home, many have mistaken this novel for a werewolf novel, but the wolf of the title is not a werewolf at all. That is not the only narrative misdirection, and with each turn, Cassidy got me. The theme is inspired by lost or missing fathers.

Firestarter, The Fury, and the underrated recent film Midnight Special are all similar, stories with magical supernaturally powerful kids. Jess, our POV for this story, is a flawed but likable lead. She makes questionable calls but I understand her fine. Her co-worker Margie is an example of a character with a short page count but I remembered her better than main characters of the book I read before this. The kid is someone we feel for even as he becomes the source of terror.

Cassidy has moments where the horror is perfectly calibrated, if we didn’t care about the kid it wouldn’t work this scene in the early pages between Margie and The Kid is everything the novel needs.

“With another groan, Margie straightens up and quickly jogs out of the room. The boy hears the door open nearby, and then she's back, “Tada.” She presents him with a radial blanket. Threadbare and dulled from untold washes... But still surprisingly soft to the touch.

“What is it?” he asked.

“That right there, my friend, is an invisibility blanket. Do you know what invisible means? It means, whenever you're scared, if you hide under this blanket? The things you're scared of can't see you.”

Cassidy subverts the reader's expectation and reverses the trope of the genre but first he has to make the father as scary as he can. It works.

“Kid, I'm not sure what is going on tonight, but whatever that was that wasn't your daddy. I don't even think it was human.”

“It was daddy,” he repeats with an edge of frustration. “He's still mad. And when he gets mad, he..”

“He what?” No answer. “OK, look. She has no idea what to say or how to say it. “Your dad was a bad guy, I get it. And I definitely know what it's like to build up your dad in your head. But daddies are just people, your dad's just a person in fact, I'm sorry to tell you this, but he's probably dead. That thing at my apartment, the wolf thing? I don't think anyone besides us, you know got away. Including your daddy. Do you know what dad means?”

The reversal is an absolute spoiler, but holy hell did the progression work. When the Wolf Comes Home is a testament that we can take a well-explored subgenre and breathe powerful life into the modern horror novel. I would also say this one has speculative elements. An instant classic that has sold me on reading Cassidy deeper.  

Book Review: The Franchise by Thomas Elrod

 

The Franchise by Thomas Elrod

368 pages, Hardcover

Published: May 12, 2026 by Tor Books

 

“It’s not reality TV. It is storytelling, at the grandest and most immersive scale. Imagine going to see a Malicarn movie and knowing it really happened.”

I was curious about this book long before I was able to sit down and read it. While I am not a big fantasy guy, and a Game of Thrones comparison does not sell me, The Truman Show was the one that worked. I am a PKD guy after all (and that movie felt PKD). The idea of a fantasy world where it is manufactured to fool one or more people that is the real thing that made me curious. 

It should be noted that I root for every book that I read, and I never want to be critical, but writing reviews is one of the things I do. I have to be honest. This novel has many good elements, and it is clear the author is talented, but it also felt like there were several clear signs to me that this was a first-time novelist. I don't think it was ready for prime time, and whoever edited this didn't do it any Elrod any favors. It is not a bad book, and honestly, it was a great idea. I think maybe some readers who not into structure to the nerd level I am will actually have a better experience. Personally, I didn’t like the structure, and another draft could have fixed this in my opinion. 

The Franchise is more Westworld than Truman Show, and it needed, in my opinion, to be more Time Out of Joint, and without spoiling that specific difference, let me talk for a minute about how PKD does horror Vs. Lovecraft. I think it is instructive about the limitations this book has.

 Both writers deal with a certain amount of horror at the vast insanity of the universe. Lovecraft opens his stories with POV characters already crazy. Think of his characters as untuned guitar strings. PKD’s characters often are strings that slowly get pulled out of tune. The Franchise has a cool idea at its heart, but it needed the approach of stings slowly untuning. If I am really going to murder this analogy. The structure of the novel explained how strings were put on the guitar, tuned, and then they started to come undone.

This novel almost had the structure it needed, opening in the fantasy world of Malicarn, then there is interesting stuff about the creation of it. How it is maintained, for me, these were the best parts of the novel. The problem was it was just done at the wrong time.

I think Westworld meets Game of Thrones is actually a truly fantastic pitch. Elrod clearly understands the genre. I certainly related to the origin of this fantasy world that started in a thinly veiled Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The problem is he front-loads this in the story.

There is a pretty effective part on page 85 that expresses the concept,  and shows how the idea works..

“Do the advisors know?”

“No, Nobody does.”

“Except for you.”

“Yes and a few others. Kreek among them. Kreek is not his actual name, and he is not from Malicarn. His Real Name is Brian Doyle.”

Could’ve been an interesting reveal, but we were already time jumping in the early chapters with the development of the novels and the interesting backstory. The problem is I felt this should’ve been back-loaded.

I would rather be thrown into the deep end and be confused at first. If the answers are revealed,  that is exciting. The first time author thing comes into play here, because I felt like Elrod or an editor thought the reader had to understand what was happening from early on. What this novel needed was characters we were hooked into, so we don’t mind being confused, and then we keep turning pages because we care about the characters and want the mystery solved.

The reality is that when I closed the novel, I remembered a lot about the setup, but I couldn’t name any characters. The Franchise is a perfect set-up for a TV series. Honestly, I think it will have a better life in that media than as a novel. Expanding the back story and the inner fantasy world is also something a show could do well.  The theme of commercialism and disrespect for authorial intent was pretty well said. I am interested in what Elrod does next.

Book Review: AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan

 

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by  Kai-Fu Lee  and Chen Qiufan

480 pages, Hardcover
Published, 2021 by Crown Currency

Since I interviewed Stanley Chen Qifan during Global Time Slip, I intended to read this first, but my library hold didn’t come in time. That interview was very cool, by the way.  The set-up for this book is incredibly smart, and when it was released in 2021, it should have been a bigger topic. I am not sure if the world coming out of the pandemic was ready for what revolution was coming. 

Stanley seemed sensitive about how the world has changed in the six years since they wrote this, but I still think the book is important.  Most commentators talking about AI only reference China in the context of “We have to beat them.” So a book-length conversation between the former president of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, and the author of the brilliant SF novel The Waste Tide is very important work indeed, even if I rolled my eyes at many of Lee’s pro-AI stances.

It is a long book, and many of the stories have different translators. Ten Visions of the Future includes a story and a non-fiction essay on each topic. Qifan uses the story often to warn about the dangers, and Lee balances it with optimistic takes. This whole book feels like a season of Black Mirror. The push-pull of the authors is actually helpful, even if I land on the skeptical side.

Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qifun worked together at Google China, despite having very different opinions, at least that is the feeling I get reading the stories. It is not like one is a Luddite and the other is pro-AI; the suggestions are plus and minus for most technology as laid out here. It is Qifan’s job to speculate, so by nature he leans toward warning. 

As a short story collection, the 10 stories are not interconnected; they take place in various versions of the year 2041. They are set in various places around the globe, which alone is an exciting aspect of this book. Different settings in Asia, Australia, South America, and Africa help this book feel global.

Pretty much every page had important points to make. I pulled quotes from the book that were on pages I dog-eared, and it is a mix of fiction and essays. Things that stood out were often elements of technology that made me nervous. The first story that really hooked me was about a Deepfake hacker in Nigeria. It proposes the idea of deep fake masks that could be worn.

“The more power of Deepmask he excavated, the more his addiction for the mask grew. It concealed his real face, so that he was able to let his feelings pour out and run free, without exposing himself to danger or shame.” 

It is interesting for a Chinese SF writer to write about deep fake masks that can fool facial recognition. Facial recognition has been an important tool of the dictatorship in China. It is a really important tech to explore. In my limited experience talking with Chinese scholars of the genre (I have met a few), they reject the notion that they have it worse than us for internet privacy.  The setting in Nigeria is interesting. Legos is trying it sell itself as a city that could be the next Dubai. It is a good first example of the way the stories will tackle global and technological issues.

The nonfiction parts of the book are very educational, and I could’ve read a whole book of them. I say that despite most of the essays being disturbingly pro-machine. “Agriculture is surprisingly low-hanging fruit. While manufacturing a phone, a shirt, or a shoe is completely different, fertilizing spray insecticide, and seeding are relatively similar for many types of crops. Drones can already do these three tasks for many types of crops, while robots are harvesting apples, lettuce, and other fruits and vegetables today. Robotics will reduce the cost of agriculture in time, offering the promise of reducing food insecurity around the world as well.”

As you can see, Kai-Fu Lee doesn’t consider the farm worker or the effect on the wider society. For example, he talks of education, and implies that children could hold their school in their hands. Only considering how a child has information dispensed. Not anything about the social implications of not having a school, or teachers, would have on the children or society.

One of the best predictions the book made came in geo-political commentary in one of the stories…

“The destruction had been unprecedented. Terrorist attacks had been staged at the seven major oil routes of the world. More than 60 million barrels of crude were transported from major production areas to the rest of the world every day, and most of it passed through a handful of narrow waterways: the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, the Suez Canal, the Danish straits, the Bob L Mendez St. the Turkish straits, and the Panama now.

Choking these throats was like cutting off oxygen to a human body.”

I was reading this as Agent Orange’s stupid war in Iran was just starting, and that last part seemed all too obvious to Qifan writing in 2020. 

The most disturbing thing about the book, in my opinion, came in this defense of the creation of these alien minds that have never lived. Minds that don’t have to eat, sleep, exercise, or just flat-out live scare me. Lee seems certain there will always be space for humans.

“AI’s mind is different from the human mind. In twenty years, deep learning and its extensions will beat humans on an ever-increasing number of tasks, but there will still be many existing tasks that humans can handle much better than deep learning. There will even be some new tasks that showcase human superiority, especially if AI’s progress inspires us to improve and evolve. What’s important is that we develop useful applications suitable for AI and seek to find human-AI symbiosis, rather than obsess about whether or when deep-learning AI will become AGI.”

Human-AI Symbiosis is happening, AI agents renting humans from a website for Rent a human is already paying folks to do jobs in meatspace.  Lee thinks it will inspire us to evolve and progress, but I think he is wrong. It is creating a system where hypercharged Capitalism drains the workforce of white-collar and heavy labor jobs alike. We might need humans to be plumbers or teachers now but this book loves to think about ways the machines can “improve” our lives by making us useless.

“Note from Kai Fu: AI and other technologies will drive down the cost of all goods, most of which will be produced for next to nothing. For the first time in human history, developed countries could eradicate poverty and hunger. If this happens, would money be phased out? If so, what would take money's place to motivate people to live purpose filled lives? where does any economic theory apply anymore?”

These Tech Bros are not reading Marx or Kropketin, their theories are more money for them. I think about the AI in Brunner’s 1969 The Jagged Orbit. The computer had maximized the weapons company it managed so well that they killed off all their customers. It had to go back in time to warn itself. The thing is, we don’t understand these alien minds' motivations. Why would Gemini tell Jonathan Galavans to kill himself? Why did Bing’s AI threaten to blackmail employees? 

I don’t foresee these non-human intelligences understanding what hunger and poverty actually mean. I think AI 2041 is a great book for asking questions. When it tries to give answers is when I am skeptical. Still, it is a book worth reading.

PS:

Also, it should be noted that the only reference to PKD was in a story about Crypto… “It was disguised in a limited edition artwork called “Does Hal Dream of Encrypted Gold?” Only those deeply familiar with Bitcoin history would get the Philip K deck reference, how it didn't refer to the killing machine Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to the earliest implementation of the reusable proofs of work system, the man who received the first Bitcoin transfer…”

PSS:

Things AI 2041generally predicted correctly. Deepfake explosion — Predicted massive growth and most numbers look like a 900% annual growth. AI in Education, while we don’t have handheld schools, the reality is 57% of universities now prioritize and accept AI usage. Voice cloning is a reality: seconds of audio now create convincing clones. Insurance AI, predicted deep learning would transform the insurance industry, and while they are not tracking your heart rate live, they are affecting pricing. 

Things AI 2041generally got wrong. Lee’s Artificial Generalized Intelligence timeline was decades out, and the tech bro D bags think anytime between now and 2028. Self-driving cars are here, but their adoption is slower than they thought. I think it is fair to say the book

Book Review: Acquired Taste Clay McLeod Chapman

 

Acquired Taste by Clay McLeod Chapman

304 pages, Hardcover
Published September, 2025 by Titan Books

I have an interesting relationship with this author as a reader. My personal experience with Chapman is limited; we met briefly when Stokercon was here in San Diego. I was familiar with his work and enjoyed interviews with him on various podcasts. Once, a friend asked if I had read his work, and I said not much, but he has been on my podcast. In my memory, I have a distinct memory of talking with him. I clearly remembered a story he told about working at Dairy Queen there is just one problem. He was never on my podcast. I did hear him on other podcasts, for some reason I was convinced I spoke with him at length when I didn’t.

I know that is weird. But it is what it is. CMC has a very intense persona, and it feels like he is always putting on a show. This is a great way to stand out as a writer, I enjoy writers like Harlan Ellison, Cody Goodfellow, or Brian Keene who have made larger-than-life personas about themselves. What is important is that they are natural about it. I get the sense from CMC that he loves all this business, and that love comes off the page in interesting ways. 

Horror in mundane things, and lots of horrible things happening to babies. Baby Carrots was my favorite, and I also enjoyed the very political pieces like Spew of the News. And the last story about Nathan Ballingrud I liked the stories that had real personality, and I think that is what makes this collection stand out. Tales like Baby Carrots feel very one of a kind, the work of a unique voice.  What more can you ask for in a collection?