Nick Cutter writes some of the scariest, goriest horror novels around, yet the Canadian author is very mild-mannered. While firing up our Zoom conversation to discuss his new book, “The Queen,” I told Cutter I was riveted by the story, but my wife could only make it halfway through the galley, as the vivid descriptions of body horror and insects made her stomach churn.
“Oh, she wouldn’t be the first one and she won’t be the last,” he says with a gentle laugh. “Not only with that one but probably some of the other Cutter books.”
Cutter is the pen name of Craig Davidson, who also writes under his government name and as Patrick Lestewka. He notes that the Cutter persona speaks to “the horror that I grew up on”: Stephen King, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz, of course, but more specifically “men and women in the drugstore spinning rack.”
That pulpy mentality reverberates through “The Queen,” Cutter’s seventh novel, out today via Gallery Books. Without giving away anything away, the story concerns best friends Margaret and Charity and the dark secrets that come up after Charity goes missing but then returns, well after being presumed dead. Finding out what happened involves many twists and turns — including some very squirmy passages.
Cutter says the initial idea for “The Queen” was rooted much more in the malaise of changing friendships once kids head off on their own than the pursuit of anything horrific.
“I grew up in a mid-size city with really close friendships,” he says. “I think we all expected when that schism summer happened that it wouldn’t really change things. It seemed inconceivable that our lives would be so markedly different in a couple of months. And then you see that same person who you grew up with two or three years later on the street and you realize that, with kind of a shock and a sadness, the distance is settled between you. You go through different stages in life and lose some people along the way.”
Despite an idea that could fuel any number of stories, Margaret and Charity’s tale turns into decidedly Cutter territory. He explains that while he’s never intending to push the horror in his novels to be scarier and more outrageous than the previous book, fear always finds its way to the forefront.
“A 180 would be very difficult 20 years into a writing career,” he says. “You realize that, at some level, that type of reinvention would be really difficult because you have your obsessions and thematic concerns, you have the way of writing and of patterning a story in your head. I think with each book things are slightly different, but some things are also like a honey bee: You go back to certain pollinating buds again and again and you’re not necessarily sure why you’re doing it. Something is driving you internally, subconsciously, back to these places where you’re reinvestigating something you’ve already taken a shot at before.”
That style has made Cutter a VIP on #HorrorBookTok, where his books — especially his 2014 debut novel “The Troop” — are frequently discussed as must-reads in the genre. Although voracious readers are already analyzing advance copies of “The Queen” on the platform, Cutter admits it’s a world he’s not too familiar with.
“It’s funny for someone who’s coming up near 50 to have a book that is popular on a platform that baffles him,” he says. “I think if I were more online, if I had more social engagement, I would probably feel it more. ‘The Troop’ specifically has, in the time since it’s been published, gone on to a life of its own. You never know how long the goddess of fortune will shine upon you because culture shifts really quickly.”
“The Troop” also might be Cutter’s first adapted novel, as James Wan’s Atomic Monster acquired the book in 2019. Cutter says that the project is still in the works, but the story of a Boy Scout expedition gone nightmarishly wrong has been slow to get off the ground.
“It has had all sorts of different ups and downs and people taking different cracks at it,” Cutter says. “It’s a strange nut to crack. It’s basically about kids dying.”
In the meantime, Cutter already has two more novels set to come out: “The Dorians,” slated for 2025, and “Gravenhurst,” set for a 2026 release. Cutter teased both stories with Variety, describing “The Dorians” as “a bunch of elderly people who have consented to assisted death are given an opportunity to go to this retreat where they have broken open the notion of the reversing the aging process. It’s a fountain of youth-type story that goes poorly.” As for “Gravenhurst,” “it’s set in a juvenile detention facility in the Northern Woods of Canada with oddness going on.”
“These are going to sound so bleak,” he says, laughing again. “The Cutter patina does not bend towards joyous, generally.”
Fans wouldn’t have it any other way.
Nick Cutter (photo by Kevin Kelly)
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