Mary: An Awakening of Terror
Nat Cassidy’s highly commercial debut horror novel Mary: An Awakening of Terror blends Midsommar with elements of American Psycho and a pinch of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.
But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.
Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.
Then the killings begin again.
Mary’s definitely going to find herself.
NAT CASSIDY has been an off-off-Broadway playwright of speculative works that have been well-received by drama critics. He has won the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for a one-man show about H. P. Lovecraft. An established actor on stage and television, usually playing monsters and villains on shows such as Blue Bloods, Bull, Quantico, and Law & Order: SVU, Mary is Cassidy’s horror debut.
Praise for Mary: An Awakening of Terror
“Mary, Mary, quite extraordinary… How does your novel grow? With pillow cases hiding sliced off faces, and porcelain dolls all in a row. With an acidic sense of humor more barbed than any cactus, Nat Cassidy’s fast-paced Mary is a perfect blend of Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne and Frank De Felitta’s Audrey Rose. This book goes out to all those bad seeds who have gone beyond their bloom and entered the twilight of their murderous lives.”—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of The Remaking
“Genuinely scary, and at times both heartfelt and heartbreaking, Mary is a powerhouse of a horror novel, with something important to say. We need more like this. Standing ovation!”—Brian Keene
“Nat Cassidy’s Mary is a bravura journey into horror, cults, and the estrangement of middle age. It’s one BANANAS ride, by a very talented writer.”—Sarah Langan
“Congrats on a loud and bloody Mary. She’s going to make herself heard and then some.”—Kathe Koja
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