We chat with author Nick Cutter about The Queen, which is a heart-pounding novel of terror about a young woman searching for her missing friend and uncovering a shocking truth.
Hi, Nick! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’m a Canadian, husband, father of two young children … hmmm, what else? Been writing for 20-odd years under both my own name (Craig Davidson) and this pen name. Lifelong reader who had a crazy dream he could become a writer and somehow managed to grab that brass ring.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Quite young. My teens. Like a lot of macabre-inclined 80s kids, Stephen King opened that gateway. I mean, there were others that predated King—ghastly library books whose titles I barely recall, spooky story onmibusses that scared me silly as a preteen (there was one about a girl with a red ribbon around her neck who forbid anyone from touching it, and when some lovestruck boy finally unstrung it, the girl’s head fell off), but it was really King who got the ball rolling. From there, Barker-Koontz-Herbert-McCammon-Rice-Straub-Jackson and others fleshed out my reading, and Carpenter-Cronenberg-Craven and many more filled in ably on the film side.
Your latest novel, The Queen, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Puberty can be really tough!
What can readers expect?
Well, more of the same really? If there’s anything that writing tends to teach you, it’s about your own preoccupations and obsessions. For me, clearly there’s a fixation with insects. Body horror. An aesthetic that a friend of mine described as “maximalist,” which is apt. So I wouldn’t say it’s any kind of departure, really, from the earlier Cutter books. The attempt is always there to marry the gore and excess to a kind of emotional resonance, which sometimes I feel may be overlooked because of my choice to indulge those maximalist tendencies. Which is a tradeoff I’m fine with.
Where did the inspiration for The Queen come from?
Oh, it has plenty of inspirational mothers and fathers. Specifically: Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Carrie, 13 Reasons Why, and a story called Leiningan Versus the Ants. More personally, it’s inspired by that time in one’s life where high school friends part ways. Those days bridging the end of high school with the start of university or college or a fulltime job: best friends who find their relationships fraying by divergent lives, new goals, new friends, and the simple hurdle of distance. Those friendships where two people tell themselves: It won’t be any different, even if we’re in separate places. We’ll call every day and I’ll be home every weekend. And those daily calls become weekly, then monthly, and those weekends home dry up, too. It’s often one friend leaving and the other staying behind, and the bittersweet sense of what each side feels and how their lives so swiftly change from how they always assumed it would be. I feel that’s a fairly universal experience.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
There’s the de facto villain of this book. He started as an Elon Musk archetype, and that DNA is still there. One of the more difficult parts of writing was (and I won’t spoil anything here) the motivation for this guy. He’s created something that doesn’t belong on earth, and my biggest question was: Why the hell would he? But he had to, y’know, seeing as the narrative hinges on it. So ultimately I came back to a trope that is often used—and in my personal belief (not largely shared I’m sure) perhaps now verging on overused—in modern horror: Trauma. Obviously, I think trauma can be used well and thoughtfully and usually/often is, in book and film. It’s always been there, of course. Pet Semetary is about the trauma of losing a child. Rosemary’s Baby, the trauma of a complicated pregnancy. I do think (unpopular opinion?) it’s sometimes a little too on-the-nose, however. So with my villain, I thought: Okay, what is the most absurd trauma a person could conceivably suffer, the impact of which influences this character to embark on this equally absurd scientific agenda? So it took awhile to get that all set in my head and express it through the character.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Where the Red Fern Grows
- The one that made you want to become an author: It
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Lord of the Flies
Why horror?
Best not to peer too deeply into the thorny thicket of my ID to riddle that one out.
What’s next for you?
A few more Cutter books. One under my own name, under contract. Early retirement and dotage.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
I really dug Ian Rogers’ Sycamore and Mason Coile’s William.
