With his breakthrough 2014 novel, The Troop, which was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of the last decade, Nick Cutter established himself as a writer of propulsive, muscular, unrelenting journeys into terror. His latest book, The Queen, reaffirms his place as one of the genre’s most entertaining storytellers, delivering a creature feature and the story of a doomed friendship in one unputdownable package.
Told over the course of a single day, the novel follows Margaret Carpenter, a young woman still reeling from the disappearance of her best friend, Charity Atwater. Margaret wakes up to find that an iPhone has been mysteriously delivered to her doorstep, and it begins pinging with messages from someone claiming to be her vanished friend. The Queen soon descends into something even darker, as Margaret embarks on a journey to find Charity and get to the bottom of an increasingly violent mystery that’s gripping their small town.
Cutter wastes no time in throwing Margaret into the deep end, and the book moves like a freight train even when he’s pulling off some surprisingly tender moments between characters. Margaret’s narration is crisp, relatable and full of the kind of urgency that you’d expect from a someone in such an extreme situation, but Cutter’s great gift is his ability to go beyond that, to build a world even as he’s building a character. There are no trade-offs in his prose, no sense that we’re slowing down to lay the groundwork for something that’ll come next. It’s all multipurpose, expertly designed to keep you turning the pages as the book’s horrors grow deeper.
As for those frights, many of which involve a fascination with insects and how they interact with the natural world, Cutter is once again in top form. If you loved the body horror of The Troop, you’re going to get that in spades, along with an element of Promethean, sci-fi terror that’s almost cosmic in its levels of dread—and, of course, buckets of gore.
Because of these ingredients, and so many more, The Queen is a must-read for horror fans, for Nick Cutter fans and for anyone hoping to stay up late with a good scary yarn.
