Look What the Cat Dragged In

The window over the kitchen sink is open, and Penny Padgett is sure she closed it. She cracked it to clear the smoke from a burnt bagel, went out to buy cat treats and a lottery ticket before the biggest snowstorm Philadelphia has seen in decades, and came home to a freezing kitchen and a silent house. Popcorn, the skittish white cat with one blue eye and one amber who inspired her three bestselling comic books, is gone. By nightfall a search party is wading through knee-deep drifts, and a stranger with a bandaged forehead claims to have seen the cat in an alley, though the fresh snow shows no paw prints at all. Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak treats that open window as its first clue, and it keeps the question alive for three hundred pages.

How It Works

The setup is a grief story that turns into a haunted-house story without ever leaving a Philadelphia row home. Penny draws Penny and Popcorn, a cat comic for ten-year-olds that has sold in fifteen territories, and Book Four is due in June. With Popcorn missing she cannot draw a line. Her boyfriend Dean, a financial middleman whose richest client is a seventy-year-old widow in the Brandywine Valley, persuades her to pet-sit that client’s black tomcat for two months while the woman travels in Europe.

The cat, Godfrey, is named after the widow’s great-grandfather, Barnabas Godfrey, a fictional Victorian illustrator who carved his pictures into blocks of wood. He arrives with rules. A rude elderly vet delivers unlabelled pouches of raw meat, an etched brass bowl and orders that the new cat flap must stay open. Penny’s block breaks overnight, and from there Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak becomes an inventory of a house going bad: beetles in the litter, a horn melody that seems to come from under the floor, blackouts, and finished pages she has no memory of drawing.

The book is also partly drawn. The finished edition carries Penny’s comic strips, drawn by the cartoonist Doogie Horner, and Barnabas Godfrey’s “engravings”, which the designer Will Staehle built as digital collages from hundreds of real nineteenth-century prints. Between them sit long excerpts from a doorstop biography of Godfrey that Penny reads in fragments. Our proof copy of Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak had the art slots blank, so judge the visuals from the finished book, but the text makes clear how much they carry.

What the Cat Dragged Into the Sketchbook

The smartest thing Rekulak does is make the pictures part of the evidence. He did it in Hidden Pictures, where a child’s drawings became testimony, and here he pushes the idea further. Penny’s comics change before she does. Popcorn quietly vanishes from her panels and Godfrey takes her place. Something with a clawed hand appears under a sofa. A mock wood engraving of the old mansion’s gates hides a detail that matters later, and the reader is invited to look harder than Penny does.

That gives Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak a theme beneath the gore. It is a book about what happens when an artist’s work stops belonging to her: when an editor wants the old jokes back, when a patron wants a portrait of his cat, when inspiration arrives from somewhere she would rather not examine. Penny’s publisher calls her pages too sad to sell; then, once the cat moves in, they become productive in a way nobody should welcome.

What works

• The comedy is genuinely good. Tarquin, Penny’s editor, talks in breathless pitches and recommends a celebrity therapist he will not name but strongly implies. Margo, who runs a cat café that doubles as a shelter, plans a search like a general. Her grandmother Angie bakes cannoli at four in the morning and keeps a patron saint for every emergency, missing cats included.
• The disgust is precise. Rekulak escalates by objects: the smell of the food pouches, a dismembered pigeon, centipedes the length of a hot dog, an exterminator who notices that the basement covers only half the house.
• Philadelphia is lived in. Cobbled one-way streets, Wawa, a bar decorated with castoff waxworks from a Jersey Shore museum. The city feels walked, not looked up.
• The ending pays off its first chapter. The open window is answered, and a clue planted on page one turns out to have been sitting there all along.

Where Look What the Cat Dragged In Gives Ground

• The middle loops. Across roughly a third of Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak the same beat repeats: Penny finds something revolting, a man explains it away, she blames herself and files it beside the mystery of the window. Each scene works; the sequence stalls.
• The reader is far ahead of Penny. The warning signs are drawn in thick marker, and seasoned horror readers will name the problem chapters before she does. Her willingness to stay in the house after being drugged without her consent strains sympathy as well as belief.
• The resolution is rushed and weightless. The finale is a gleeful creature-feature set piece, but the aftermath takes a few pages, two deaths go essentially unexamined, and nobody faces the police. A book this interested in consequences for an artist shows little interest in consequences for anyone else.

Read These Next

Rekulak arrived with The Impossible Fortress, an Edgar finalist set in the 1980s home-computer era, then broke out with the Goodreads Choice winner Hidden Pictures and followed it with a wedding thriller that won an ITW Thriller Award. If Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak is your first of his, these are the natural next stops.

1. The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak, for his most recent novel, an estranged father at his daughter’s wedding on a wealthy family’s estate.
2. Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak, for the drawings-as-evidence device in its first and scariest form.
3. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix, for another horror novel that is unafraid to be funny and tender at once.
4. The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger, for a young woman, a too-perfect home and neighbours with plans for her.
5. Pet Sematary by Stephen King, if the bond between people and their animals is the part that gets under your skin.

The Verdict

There is a better, tighter book inside this one, perhaps sixty pages shorter, with a heroine who trusts her gut a chapter or two sooner and a finale that lingers on what it has broken. But Rekulak is too good an entertainer to waste his premise. The voice is warm, the jokes are sharp, the horror is properly nasty, and the use of pictures as clues remains his signature trick.

Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak is uneven, overlong and frequently delightful. Readers who share a home with a cat will finish it and check the window latches, then check them again. And then they will look a little longer at whatever is purring on the end of the bed.