The valet will not let go of her hand. Penny Padgett has stepped out of her boyfriend’s leased BMW onto the gravel of a Brandywine Valley estate with no street address, and the young man in white gloves keeps hold of her wrist until Dean walks round to collect her, as if she might bolt. Inside, a woman in pearls fastens a crown of wildflowers to her head with thorns, explaining that single blooms are reserved for the married. Then, in a bathroom papered with honorary degrees and a thank-you note from a president, Penny hears a cat crying through the ceiling vent. Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak follows that cry down a dark corridor, through a gallery of old prints, and into a library where a black tom is standing on an open dictionary, waiting for her.
It is the best chapter in the book, and it lays out the whole contract. Every courtesy at this party is slightly too firm. Every guest is decades older than Penny and delighted to meet her. By the time the hostess asks a favour, the reader knows the answer should be no.
A Cartoonist Without Her Cat
Penny makes cat comics for children, and she makes them out of her own life. When Popcorn, the real cat behind the strip, disappears in a February blizzard, the work dies with her. The early chapters are honest about how grief flattens a person: weeks of a hoodie and the same purple socks, a binge through every episode of an old angel drama, a revised book proposal so bleak her editor begs her to bring the jokes back.
The backstory explains why the loss cuts so deep. Penny grew up in small-town Ohio as the child adults called good with animals, and she was halfway through art school in Philadelphia when her parents were killed on an expressway by a driver who was livestreaming at the wheel. Six weeks later she coaxed a filthy white kitten out from under a dumpster in the faculty car park, and the animal dived headfirst into a classmate’s bowl of popcorn. The comics began as kitchen-wall gags for her housemates and grew into a career. In Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak, the cat is not a pet so much as the last family Penny has, and the novel takes that seriously.
So when Evelyn Bruehl, the widow who owns the mansion and adores Penny’s books, asks her to mind the cat for two months while she tours the Mediterranean, the request lands on a woman with nothing left to refuse with. Dean, desperate to keep his richest client happy, does the rest.
The Boyfriend Problem in Look What the Cat Dragged In
The novel’s ancestor is easy to name. Like Rosemary’s Baby, it is a story about a young woman whose partner’s ambitions are served by her compliance, whose body begins to fail, and whose every complaint is met with a reasonable-sounding explanation. Ira Levin built that machine in a Manhattan apartment; Rekulak relocates it to a renovated row house and gives it a cat flap.
Dean is the hinge, and he is the weakest-drawn person on the page. A former athlete in a suit and tie who volunteers for karaoke and gifts his season tickets to clients, he is written so broadly that his every reassurance reads as a warning. The point of the story is the pattern of gaslighting that wears Penny down, and on that level it works: each dismissal is small, plausible and cumulative. But Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak would frighten more if Dean were harder to read.
The counterweights are the friends. Greg, the shelter volunteer whose heart Penny broke, turns up for the blizzard search in a bright orange snowsuit that makes him look like an escaped prisoner, and he is the only character who asks the right questions. His landlord, a paranoid elderly locksmith who interrogates every visitor about their home security provider, steals the late chapters with the kind of comic timing that keeps the book buoyant.
Where Look What the Cat Dragged In Turns Nasty
Rekulak writes revulsion with relish. The cat’s food arrives in unmarked pouches. Things are left on the kitchen floor that nobody should have to identify. Penny’s skin breaks out, her weight drops, she loses whole nights, and she starts finding finished pages on her desk that she does not recall producing. The middle stretch of Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak is where Rekulak earns his genre shelf. The pacing tightens sharply in the last third of the middle section, and a visit to a veterinary clinic during a power cut is as frightening as anything in recent mainstream horror.
The comedy never quite stops, and mostly that is a strength. The editor, the café regulars and the dry vet who calls her sedative cocktail by the name of a cat food brand all give the dread room to breathe. But the tonal swerves can be abrupt. Midway through, while bathing a bloodied animal, Greg delivers a long confession about his former job at a tech company whose companion chatbot, Eden, was sold on the promise that it would never refuse its users, and about the violence that followed. It is a serious subject handled sincerely, and it belongs in a different novel. Dropped into a creature feature, it halts everything.
The other misstep is quieter. The vet’s silent assistant, a scarred young man said to speak no English, exists purely to look sinister and then to be used by the plot. In a book otherwise generous to its oddballs, his treatment is careless.
The Debt and the Departure
What separates Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak from pastiche is its interest in making art. Penny’s ruin and her productivity arrive together, and the novel keeps asking whether the work flooding out of her is hers. That question gives the horror a second layer that Levin never needed, and it gives Rekulak, a writer who has always been drawn to pictures, his best material.
Where the book falters is in its last movement. The climax is wildly entertaining, a full-throated B-movie sequence that cat owners will cheer. Yet the final chapters slide into a romantic comedy glow that sits oddly with what came before, and some readers will feel that a story about being disbelieved deserved a reckoning rather than a tidy coda.
For those weighing it up: expect violence against people and animals, sustained medical dread, coercion within a relationship and frequent crude humour, though very little that is sexually explicit.
Where It Leaves You
Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak is a crowd-pleaser with teeth: overlong, uneven in tone and stronger at building dread than at answering it, yet rarely dull. Readers who enjoy a gothic estate with something rotten in the foundations should try Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose heroine is also told her senses are lying. Anyone taken with the idea of drawings that hide a crime will find a colder, more cerebral version in Strange Pictures by Uketsu. And Levin’s novel remains the obvious companion for seeing what Rekulak borrowed and what he made his own.
The black tom on the dictionary is still the image that lingers. He chose her in the first hour of that party, and Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak never lets the reader forget how easy it was to say yes.