After turning imaginary friends into a source of terror in Hidden Pictures and unsettling domestic life in The Last One at the Wedding, Jason Rekulak returns with Look What the Cat Dragged In, a supernatural chiller that asks just how much trouble one seemingly innocent cat can bring through the cat flap.
The book follows twenty-seven-year-old Philadelphia cartoonist Penny Padgett, who agrees to pet-sit Godfrey, a rather peculiar cat that quickly becomes her constant companion. But her nightmares soon turn violent, insects overrun her basement, and her once-cute illustrations take on a dark, surreal life of their own. As Penny’s health deteriorates, she begins to suspect that Godfrey is no ordinary cat — and that whatever has followed him home may be coming after her.
As with Hidden Pictures, Jason Rekulak makes deft, inventive use of prose and artwork, their interplay lending the creeping horror an unsettling visual life of its own. The result is a deliciously imaginative chiller that proves just how much more terrifying a story can become when words and images work in perfect concert.
ADD TO GOODREADS
To celebrate today’s release, CinemaChords sat down with Rekulak to discuss a protagonist whose semi-autobiographical comics take a sinister turn as she unwittingly draws disturbing images that foreshadow the horrors to come, and whether his own books serve as a kind of creative scrapbook. We also talked about the various cinematic influences behind Look What the Cat Dragged In, from the supernatural thrills and chills of Gremlins and Ghostbusters to the bleak humour and horror of touchstones such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, before discussing how original artwork can take a horror story somewhere words alone simply cannot.
