REVIEW: Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak
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, featuring more than eighty pages of illustrations.
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 happening: 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. . . .
CW/TW – violent death off page, gaslighting, harm to animals, animal in danger, body gore/gloop horror
Also – the book has 60 illustrations which lots of reviewers are wild about but they were not in my arc so I can’t comment on them.
Dear Mr. Rekulak,
Well ….
that was different. Based on the last two books of yours I’ve read, I did expect some violence and dark stuff. I did not expect this book. But it is perfect for a Dark Halloween.
Penny thinks the worst has happened when her beloved cat Popcorn, the inspiration for Penny’s best selling preteen cartoon graphic series about a woman and her cat, disappears from her boyfriend’s townhome at the start of Snowmageddon. Penny has no idea what’s in store for her next.
The start of the book is fine and totally grounded in reality. Then the tension and odd occurrences begin to appear. Then the gaslighting starts and the eeriness kicks up another notch. The vibe is definitely getting creepy. Is Penny “with it?” Is she experiencing grief? Is she in cloud cuckooland? It is hard to tell at first as there are explanations aplenty that make sense to explain the weird stuff. Several friends try to talk her through her issues and worry about her due to concern for her mental health.
I’m not sure how I’d react to months of grief and or intense weirdness that others don’t see or hear and assure Penny that she’s making up. Penny tries to come up with reasonable excuses for what she experiences to keep herself from feeling she’s totally unraveling. But then things jump the rails.
I have to admit that as the denouement comes into view, things go sideways and, for me, downways. I did have fun mentally yelling everything that should be yelled as the FMC goes further into danger. I mean really, only what is going on excuses Penny for making several seriously bad decisions and proceeding with even more bad actions. This seems to be a wink and a nod at so many horror movies. But … at the very end it seemed more silly to me than threatening. There’re also the metric bonkers worth of red flags waving. Further into the book, there are Reasons to accept that Penny notices and then moves past them. But in the beginning? Nope.
The writing is, as always, engaging to me. The tension and mounting sense of danger at the beginning are handled well. Still I guessed a lot of the stuff that isn’t revealed until later. The last bit of the book also felt “stiff,” or maybe awkward is a better term, along with some telling instead of showing. It was good until suddenly it wasn’t. But I like that it has a mostly happy ending even if I did, at several points, yell at Penny for being stupid – maybe that is a sticking to tropes thing – and feel sorry for poor Greg. Greg deserves so much better. C
~Jayne
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