Author Nick Cutter.Kevin Kelly/Supplied
When many Canadian writers approach their craft, they seem to consider how melancholy and ruminative they can become with recondite and lyrical descriptions of characters and their environments. When Nick Cutter sits down to write, his driving concern is what might happen if an angry, overly aggressive wasp stung someone in the eyeball.
That image is not a spoiler: It appears in the prologue of Cutter’s latest exercise in body horror, The Queen. The sequence, which features the novel’s protagonist, Margaret Carpenter, taking refuge in the walk-in freezer of the St. Catharines Golf and Country Club’s kitchen while a swarm of yellowjackets mercilessly attacks the crowd gathered in the ballroom outside, is one of Cutter’s patented horror set-pieces, the kind devoted readers will be familiar with from earlier novels such as The Troop and The Deep.
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“I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” Cutter says over a beer in a downtown Toronto watering hole, where he explains the motivation for creating stories that are calculated to make readers shudder. “You want to entertain yourself. You want to have something that makes you wake up in the morning and sit down and write these books and do the best you can with them, following whatever your muse happens to be that day.”
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In the years since Cutter, who also writes more literary fare under his real name, Craig Davidson, has been publishing horror fiction, his muse has taken him to some frankly bizarre places. His 2014 debut, The Troop, was about a Scout troop that succumbs to a grotesque infection by bioengineered worms while on a weekend camping trip. The 2017 novel Little Heaven, arguably Cutter’s most ambitious to date, is an apocalyptic tale that combines the folk horror of The Wicker Man with the outré gore of Evil Dead.
For his new novel, Cutter melds the coming-of-age stories of two adolescent girls – the first time he has focused on women as central characters – and their unwitting entanglement in a bonkers scientific scheme involving the aforementioned wasps and cooked up by an Elon Musk-type billionaire. Needless to say, things go badly for everyone concerned.
Cutter’s approach to horror, which has not changed markedly since his first foray into the woods with that doomed Scout troop, has always reached back to the kind of 1980s pulp paperbacks he grew up reading. This is where the author claims affinity and inspiration – in the work of Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Clive Barker and their ilk. For The Queen, he extends his influences to Carl Stephenson’s classic genre tale Leiningen Versus the Ants and H.G. Wells’s The Empire of the Ants, both of which he cites in his acknowledgments.
One book that is not mentioned but serves as a clear signpost for elements of The Queen is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s a book Cutter does not single out in part because its influence is so pervasive in the genre, as well as being foundational to the way he operates as a novelist. “I find my horror work goes two ways,” he says. “It’s either the Promethean man aspiring to do something beyond his reach to make nature match his vision and failing spectacularly. Or, it’s a Lovecraftian horror that is usually puppeting another evil man and there are people on a lower level fighting against that.”
Whatever the origins of his genre approach, they seem to be working. When The Troop was first published, it benefited from a number of external factors, not the least being an endorsement from Stephen King, who called it “old-school horror at its best.” The book sold well, eventually garnering a movie deal with filmmaker James Wan’s production company. But it found renewed interest in the past few years via TikTok, where it became a viral sensation.
No one seemed more surprised by this development than Cutter himself. “The way that books are being popularized has changed,” he says. “You’re grateful if you get swept up, because the idea is that it’s for the new generation of writers. But every so often, they go back and pick up an old chestnut.”
While it’s still too soon to determine whether The Queen will match the earlier book’s success, there is undoubtedly a loyal horror readership that will be eager to seek it out and discover what new mayhem the author has in store. There is, of course, one other group that will inevitably weigh in: reviewers. But that’s a group that Cutter says he doesn’t pay much attention to any more.
“I just don’t read reviews at this point,” he says. “The nice ones, you tend to think, ‘You’re just being a cupcake on me.’ And the bad ones, you think, ‘You’ve found the most corroded and base part of my soul and squeezed it in your fist.’”