Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Pictures and The Last One at the Wedding comes a new supernatural thriller about a young woman pet-sitting a cat with a mysterious secret.

Meet Penny Padgett, a twenty-seven-year-old cartoonist in Philadelphia who agrees to pet-sit a very peculiar cat named Godfrey in her home. At first, he’s a warm and affectionate companion who follows Penny all around the house and insists on sleeping by her side every night. But soon strange things are Penny is haunted by disturbing and violent nightmares. There’s a terrible insect infestation in her basement. Her cute cartoon illustrations turn dark and surreal, as if influenced by some invisible hand. And her health starts failing, as if her mind and body are under attack by a sinister, malevolent force.

Penny may be a cat person, but she’s starting to think Godfrey is no ordinary cat. . . .

"Jason Rekulak’s new novel is intensely plotted, wonderfully frightening, and wildly clever. He more than lives up to his reputation as having “a freakishly fertile imagination” —The New York Times

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

If you ever go to a dinner party and someone asks you to wear a flower wreath, just turn around and leave. Especially when you’re the youngest female at said dinner party.

That’s the kind of instinct this book will train into you, because Rekulak has a gift for making the ordinary feel loaded with dread. A wreath, a dinner invitation, a friendly neighbor — nothing here is as innocent as it looks, and by the time you realize it, you’re already in too deep to leave the party yourself.

The first few chapters were a little slow to get started. Rekulak takes his time setting the pieces on the board, easing you into the world and the characters before he lets anything sinister creep in. But once it started, it kept me enthralled, with tension and suspense building steadily, scene by scene, until I couldn’t put it down.

At its core, it’s a combination of The Sentinel by Jeffrey Konvitz and Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin — that same sense of an ordinary woman slowly realizing the community around her isn’t what it seems, and that the people offering her kindness may have very different plans for her. If you loved the slow-burn paranoia of those classics, you’ll recognize the DNA here immediately.

That said, Rekulak put a fresh spin on this type of story. His writing is entertaining and written in a way that makes the prose accessible to a wide range of ages, without ever losing the edge that horror readers come for. He balances dark, unsettling material with enough warmth and humor that the book never feels punishing to read — it just feels wrong in exactly the right ways. The story is creepy and unsettling, and it creeps under your skin, burrowing in slowly rather than jump-scaring you. It’s definitely one that I’ll be thinking about for a while.

Stephanie Nemeth-Parker did an amazing job of bringing this story to life. I really enjoy her narration, and she brought each character to life with a unique voice, which made the ensemble cast easy to follow and even easier to get attached to — right before Rekulak twists the knife.

Bottom line: if you’re a fan of cult-adjacent horror with a slow-burn build and a killer atmosphere, Look What the Cat Dragged In earns a spot on your TBR — and maybe a permanent side-eye toward your neighbors.