Occult satire, unreliable men, and a very bad cat: A deep view inside the novel, One Bad Cat

One Bad Cat is a novel that grew out of a simple premise and ended up somewhere far stranger, funnier, and more psychologically tangled than it first appeared. At its core, it’s an occult satire built around two intersecting storylines: a psychology professor who is turned into a cat by members of his coven, and a man trying to keep his life from falling apart after he lets a persistent stray cat into his apartment.

Dr. Stephen Scott begins the story in a position of intellectual authority. He’s a psychology professor with an interest in the occult, someone who believes he understands systems and people well enough to stay a step ahead. That control collapses when a group of female coven members cast a spell that transforms him into a cat. From there, his storyline tightens into something immediate and claustrophobic: a mind trapped in a body that no longer obeys it, focused on revenge, survival, and the recovery of a charm bag that contains the source of his power.

Writing Stephen in first-person, present tense was a deliberate choice. It forces the reader directly into his consciousness, without distance or interpretation. Everything feels urgent, justified, and increasingly unstable. His voice becomes a kind of locked room in itself—one where rationalization and paranoia can escalate without interruption.

On the other side is Christopher Lombard, a man who would probably describe himself as decent, wronged, and unlucky. His girlfriend leaves him for an ex, he’s hit with a questionable domestic violence accusation, and he’s still financially entangled in a relationship that has already ended. Then there’s his coworker, promoted ahead of him in a way he reads as unfair, reinforcing his sense that the world keeps tilting against him.

When a stray cat begins demanding entry to his apartment through the bedroom window, Chris eventually gives in. From that point forward, things start to shift in ways he doesn’t fully recognize. His storyline is written in third person, past tense, creating a subtle distance between him and the reader. We observe him rather than inhabit him, which mirrors his own relationship to his life: things happen, and he narrates them afterward rather than interrogating his role in them.

That contrast in narration styles does a lot of the book’s structural work. Stephen’s sections are immediate and self-justifying, while Chris’s are reflective and often oblivious to what he is revealing. Stephen insists on control even as it slips away; Chris moves through events assuming he is largely passive in their direction. The result is a tension between agency and interpretation that drives the satire.

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Chris, in particular, sits in that familiar literary space of the “nice guy” archetype—someone who experiences repeated misfortune but rarely examines his own inertia. He is constantly acted upon, but rarely acts, and the story lets that pattern stand without softening it. Readers will likely recognize him quickly, and reactions to him may not be especially comfortable.

Stephen, meanwhile, is more complicated than his predicament initially suggests. Without giving away too much, the coven’s decision to turn him into a cat raises questions that deepen as the story progresses. What looks like punishment may also be containment. The closer the narrative gets to the possibility of reversal, the more uncertain it becomes whether restoring Stephen would actually fix anything—or simply return a problem to human scale.

Tone is where the book came alive for me as a writer. It’s meant to be funny, but not in a clean or conventional way. It’s more about escalation, misalignment, and watching people insist on their own logic even as reality refuses to cooperate. There were moments while writing it where I genuinely had to stop because I was laughing too much at where a scene had ended up. “Cackled out loud” is probably closer to accurate than anything more restrained.

The alternating perspectives allow that tonal tension to work on two different frequencies. Stephen’s first-person present tense traps us inside urgency and justification. Chris’s third-person past tense turns his story into something almost observational, as though we’re watching a sequence of events unfold without him fully understanding the pattern they form. Together, they create a push and pull between control and denial, intent and consequence.

At its heart, the novel is about people who believe they understand their place in the world—and what happens when that belief is disrupted. Sometimes that disruption comes through magic. Sometimes it comes through misreading other people entirely. And sometimes it comes in the form of a cat that refuses to behave like a cat should.

The question the story keeps circling is simple: when power shifts hands, who actually understands what’s happening—and who is just telling themselves a story about it? Get your copy of One Bad Cat today!

This post is part of a series where I pull back the curtain on the novels I’ve written, beginning with Valley of the Bees, a dystopian YA novel about survival, freedom, and growing up in a near-future world where girls have little control over their own lives. Each post looks at how a story took shape and what it taught me about finishing the work I start. Learn about this book and others from Elderfly Press today!

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Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.