Gore and more

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This article was published 30/11/2024 (679 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nick Cutter, the dark and spooky alter-ego of CanLit darling Craig Davidson, rises once again with a decidedly pulpy, Cronenbergian novel of body horror, teenage emotions and bugs. Lots of bugs.

While Cutter was definitely a major contributor to the rise of the current horror boom, he seems to have gone a little bit quiet in the last few years. The current publishing model imposed by the larger publishers means most writers now need to produce books at breakneck speed — usually multiple titles per year. Cutter’s last single-author print novel was 2017’s Little Heaven.

But Cutter has also released an audiobook-only novel, 2021’s The Breach, and co-authored The Handyman Method with Andrew F. Sullivan. He’s also released the story collection Cascade (2020) and the 2018 novel The Saturday Night Ghost Club under his real name, Craig Davidson. So while he’s hardly been sitting around twiddling his thumbs, horror fans have been waiting on the next Nick Cutter novel for what feels like a while.

Which brings us to The Queen, a novel which harkens back to the previous horror boom of the 1970s and ’80s. Cutter has been upfront about how big an influence Stephen King is on his novels, most specifically Carrie, which served as a kind of model for The Troop, Cutter’s best-known novel. Carrie is very much the source material once again, perhaps even more so.

The Queen centres on a teenage girl protagonist. Taking place over the course of one day, the novel opens on Margaret Carpenter struggling to get out of bed, as she has been for weeks after her best friend Charity Atwater went missing. Margaret finds an iPhone on her doorstep with text messages claiming to be from Charity, which leads her on a bizarre scavenger hunt that will explain where Charity has gone and lay the groundwork for the complete devastation which is about to befall the small town of St. Catharines, Ont.

Running in parallel is the story of Rudyard Crate, an eccentric billionaire whose sister was eaten alive by ants when he was 10 years old. Most readers will be able to piece together the mad scientist motivation that leads us into the kind of horrific scenario one would expect from this older-fashion type of pulpy drugstore wire-rack paperback.

Previous Cutter novels have never held back in terms of gore, but The Queen absolutely hits a new height for the author. Any readers squeamish about bugs will certainly have their skin crawl and their endurance tested. The amount of gross body expulsions and gallons of blood and other goo that fills the pages greatly outpaces Cutter’s previous novels.

The other element of King’s Carrie that Cutter used in The Troop and again here is the epistolary form — entries that are documents or articles which touch on the events described in the novel. With The Queen, these sections don’t add much to the narrative and are also all bunched together, which limits any sense of mystery they might have added to the plot.

In pulpy fashion, the plot here is straightforward and barrels forward quickly. But the epistolary format works better with a slow burn, where details need to be teased out, and so it’s a touch out of place for this particular story. There is, however, a brief nod which makes mention of the events in The Troop, and so fans may be excited at the prospect of Cutter turning a version of St. Catharines into something akin to Stephen King’s shared universe of Maine towns such as Derry and Castle Rock.

Cutter’s bona fides as an author of more highbrow Canadian “literature” are on display here, of course. The quality of Craig Davidson’s writing has long been recognized by various awards juries and prizes, and he doesn’t use the Cutter pseudonym to dumb down his literary style.

But some of the deeper thematic elements are out of place with the pulpier sensibility of this novel. The relationship between Margaret and Charity as teenage best friends whose life circumstances push them apart is well-drawn and complex, but somewhat at odds with the over-the-top nature of the bug body horror gorefest.

Similarly, Cutter adds some tidbits about internet and teen culture and a hive mind, but they aren’t given much space, and so that potential exploration fizzles away.

But with the pulpy, propulsive horror on display here, none of that detracts from the most enjoyable elements of the novel. Cutter is in fine pulp horror form with The Queen, a novel that could have easily been a part of the ’80s horror paperback heyday. It’s gross, bloody, grim and over-the-top — and great fun.

Keith Cadieux is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His latest story collection Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings is out now from At Bay Press. He also co-edited the horror anthology What Draws Us Near, published by Little Ghosts Books.