Nat Cassidy is a playwright of off-off-Broadway speculative works that have been well-received by drama critics. He’s also an established actor of stage and television, where he usually plays monsters and villains, including in the shows Blue Bloods, Bull, Quantico, and Law & Order: SVU. He is also the author of the horror novels Mary, Nestlings, and the forthcoming When the Wolf Comes Home (Tor Nightfire). He talks with LJ about the horror genre, his theater background, and indie publishing.

While all of your novels are terrifying, compelling, and original on their own, each story is clearly built upon horror traditions, tropes, and works from the genre’s past. Can you take readers through how you incorporate these elements?

I’ve always been preoccupied with the ways familiar stories can be mutated and refracted to say new things about changing times. Not to sound too precocious, but I think some of this comes from my background as a classical actor. I’ve been performing/obsessing over Shakespeare since I was like six years old, and it engendered in me a persistent fascination with the interplay between art from the past and the present. Not just because classical theater is itself old material, but because even Shakespeare was taking established stories and tropes and seeing what they could say about his contemporary life.

Mary was my way of doing that with Carrie (a book that means a great deal to me), while also wrestling with the legacy of sometimes-misogynistic horror tropes, ranging from gothic cliches to giallo films to serial-killer obsessions. Nestlings was my way of taking paranoiac thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby and Salem’s Lot and imagining how Jewish protagonists might fare within tales that usually invoke crucifixes and Antichrists. And Wolf is me doing that with the action-y, thriller-y horror paperbacks I used to inhale back in the ’80s and ’90s. I wanted to use the framework of a chase narrative to unpack my own anxieties about things like catastrophizing and intrusive thoughts and a world that feels like it’s constantly getting worse. It’s a story about the nature of fear itself, particularly the difference between childhood fears and grown-up ones. Plus, it’s about my relationship to father figures (both my actual dad and the literary ones that influenced my writing).

I just love digesting old things with new enzymes—and new things with old enzymes. Because ultimately that’s all storytelling is, right? This baton relay from one individual to the next, sometimes over centuries, saying, “Here’s how being alive feels to me.” These tropes give us effective, almost Platonistic reference points to facilitate that exchange.

Your rise as a popular horror novelist began in a unique place: as a horror playwright. Can you share your experiences with writing and producing genre plays?

Playwriting’s such a great training ground for writers in general. Writing for the stage really forces you to break stories in a uniquely economical and dynamic way. You’re limited as far as effects go (especially in the low-budget theater I come from), and the main tools at your disposal are the human body and voice. This means you have to rely primarily on compelling scenarios and on human interaction, on things people can do and say to each other. Those are fantastic parameters for a scary story; you’re forced to keep the proceedings grounded in character and connected to the human corpus, literally and figuratively.

Besides books, theater is my favorite medium for horror. And it’s really hard to be effectively frightening on stage, but when it works it works. I could go on and on about why—and how—theater operates as a medium for terror (or especially, my favorite emotion to evoke: dread), but there’s one thing I find particularly beautiful about the genre onstage. For me, horror is a holy thing. I mean that sincerely. Not only are horror stories thrilling and fun, but the genre as a whole represents this profound, communal exhumation of anxiety, this group confrontation of our strange existence as a mortal animal that knows its own mortality. Theater, too, is a communal act—its own sort of holy exchange—and when the two combine successfully it can make for something unexpectedly transcendent. I mean, hell, just look at Hamlet. It’s often considered the greatest work in the English language, and the damn thing’s really just a spooky ghost story with a high body count!

You are one of a few notable major-press horror authors who continue to also publish with trusted independent presses. Tell us about that decision.

First off, let me just say I’m immensely proud to be a Nightfire author. It’s an honor to share a roster with some of the best traditionally published horror authors in the game. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else as a novelist. That said, I mean, I’ll always be a downtown, indie theater kid at heart, so I’ve got a soft spot for the smaller, scrappier institutions too. There are so many incredible indie houses, and so many inspiring, brilliant writers working with them. There’s a particular flexibility to the indie scene—artistically and logistically. You can try weirder things, flex different muscles. The process is nimbler too. One of the many reasons I was so excited to release my recent novella, Rest Stop, with Shortwave Publications (besides their amazing design work and curation) was that I really wanted that particular story to come out before the 2024 election, and there was just no way to make that schedule happen with a traditional press…. And if the (very relative) familiarity or reach of my name as a traditionally published author also helps bring people to discover an indie press [or a] labor of love they might not have otherwise known about? All the better.

Would you share some of the books and authors you wish more readers knew about?

Ugh, too many! It’s a great problem to have: Horror fiction is an absolute embarrassment of riches right now. I’ll refrain from naming contemporary authors, because I’ll feel terrible leaving out too many that deserve shoutouts. Instead, lemme shout out a press: Valancourt Books. Talk about the building on works from the genre’s past: Valancourt has brought so many incredible horror books back into print and introduced me to several that have gone on to become all-time favorites for me (such as Ken Greenhall’s Hell Hound, Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us, their “World Horror” collections, and anything by Michael McDowell, who was a true pulp genius). I’m always excited whenever they announce a new acquisition, and I feel like they accomplish something similar to what I was describing at the top of this conversation: they make a familiar-feeling canon feel new and exciting again.