Nestlings

Spooky little guys

This one I’m gonna try to keep spoiler-free, but there are a few things about the book I’ll be discussing that can’t be avoided if this review is going to have any merit to it. With that in mind, proceed at your own discretion if you’re really trying hard not to have any aspect spoiled for you, but I’ll give warnings as to what I’m giving away as they come along.

I’m going to kick this review officially off with my general feelings for the book. Nat Cassidy’s Nestlings is an exceptionally well-written story and incredibly fun. I picked it up and had to seriously pace myself the entire time, it was the only book that I would have for an entire week-long trip and it killed me to take as long as I did. It wasn’t extremely scary, although it did have some seriously good suspense to it, and some scenes did make my skin crawl. It didn’t keep me up at night, so if that’s a deal-breaker for you then I’m sorry to hear it because you’re missing out on one of the best books I’ve read over the past 365 days. It has great personality to its characters, although it’s a small cast everyone felt incredibly distinct, personable, and notably not annoying. Well, the ones that weren’t supposed to be horrendous people weren’t annoying. I never found myself saying “God I wish this chapter would just end already so we can move on to the next POV,” even though some take place through the eyes of a positively god-awful person. Still, it kept me enthralled and wanting for more.

I’m going to give away a little bit about the villains here now, so turn back if you don’t want that, it’s only until the end of the paragraph. Firstly, I liked that they weren’t comically evil, even though I can be very often heard lamenting the trend of “redeemable villains,” sometimes that can be done extremely well. This is one of those cases, and while the villains were never redeemed, nor should they be, I still could understand their point of view and didn’t have an exceptionally good argument against it. The book focuses on a building infested with one of the most interesting takes on vampires I’ve ever seen. I loved the way they were characterized, the way their mythology was shifted, the way they presented themselves. It was interesting and horrifying and novel and a desperately-needed fresh take on the creatures themselves. I love vampires, I love ancient people with slicked-back hair and popped collars turning into bats and sucking blood. What can I say? I’m a simple girl with simple needs, and that’s one of them. That said, I do really love a new take on the old critters, and this one fits very snugly into my growing catalogue of beloved vampire tales. I think that they’re a very comfortable creature to use, and because of that they don’t actually get much love anymore because they’ve become “boring.” Vanilla. Whatever you want to call it. And that’s unfortunate. There are so many good stories, like this one, that can take tried-and-true classics to a whole new level. The novel bleeds ingenuity and its villains are a great reflection of that. There is so much I could say about them, but it’s better if you just read it.

I’m going to be discussing characters and motivations now, so if that gets your goat then git on outta here. I love desperation in horror, it goes so well with the genre and really nails down your protagonists in place. Much as I do love a relentless pursuer, there’s something about that desperate need for some sort of macguffin, in this case affordable housing, that forces the protagonists into staying damn well past when they reasonably should have. The choice to center this story around affordable housing really casts its villains in a uniquely despicable light, and I loved it for it. It’s relatable beyond belief nowadays and made the main characters instantly sympathetic, even beyond how criminally down-on-their-luck they are. The complications of pregnancy and disability also help to surround this novel in despair and helplessness that really set it apart from the crowd to me. The characters are crotchety and upset about their lives and how the people around them act, irrationally so at times, but also in a way that’s entirely relatable. I’m not a person that needs a character to be relatable, frankly I think it’s overdone these days, but in this case the main couple are humanized in blisteringly realistic ways. Even experiences I’ve never had before, like paraplegia and postpartum, felt almost familiar in how earnestly they were applied. The characters slip right off of the page and into reality, from deplorable landlords to spooky ghouls and goblins to the unfortunate people caught between them.

A quick couple downsides I do have, very minor qualms in all, are just that I wish there had been some more scares or creeps that I know that Cassidy can do. There was some fantastic suspense in this novel, and while I can’t say that I know exactly where to put it, I do find myself wanting for more. That said, that’s probably more an advertisement for Cassidy’s other books than it is a mark against Nestlings itself. There was also a storyline that I wish that I’d seen more from, involving — VERY MINOR SPOILER — a walker and a physical therapist, and while I understand that it’s probably better to have left it where it lied and not explored the happenings too too carefully, I am a little bit bummed how the scenes ended. That said, these are all very minor complaints that only registered to me well after I had finished the book. As far as things that actually hampered my enjoyment of the book go, there’s really not much to be found.

Go to your library, go to a bookstore, go wherever you want to that isn’t Amazon and buy this book.