Interview With Nick Cutter, Author Of ‘The Dorians’

If you were prepared to die and had come to terms with it, and then were given the opportunity of eternal youth by reversing your age and basically starting over, would you do it? Enter The Dorians, the latest novel by renowned horror author Nick Cutter (read our other interview with him HERE).

On a remote island in the Canadian wilderness, five elderly volunteers from different walks of life are given a tantalizing offer: to stall their biological clocks or even reverse them, restoring their lost youth. The chance to put death on pause—forever, perhaps. The remarkable secret lies in the high-tech harnessing of an ancient and extraordinary biological agent…one with no conscience, yet possessed with a single-minded purpose that has helped it persist for eons: the will to survive. The dark heart of unbridled human ambition finds its apex in an unholy experiment that now tests the limits of both creator and subject, eclipsing all bounds of morality and sanity…

To celebrate the release of the book, I chatted with Nick (read one of our interviews with him HERE) via Zoom about the inspiration for the story, his career as a writer, how Craig Davidson became Nick Cutter (read our interview with him HERE), and more!

PopHorror: I read The Dorians, which I really enjoyed, so I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

Nick Cutter: Great!

PopHorror: What sparked the idea for The Dorians and how did the project come about?

Nick Cutter: I guess what sparked it probably is I’m 50. I’m 50 now but when I wrote this, I was I think 48 and I’d just reached that age where I’m seeing my parents get older. I’m seeing my parents battle certain things. We’re approaching that spot in the road where we are losing the generation ahead of us and we are becoming more aware of our own bodies and our own frailties. When I was a kid, my mom and dad, and probably you feel the same way Tiffany, they were invincible, it felt like. They were strong, they were resourceful, they could endure. There was no sense of weakness to them at all and obviously as you get older you recognize your parents are just human beings like all of us and are prone to the same frailties that we all have. I guess the idea of a Fountain of Youth is certainly not unique to me and I’m not the first person or the hundredth person who has come up with an idea that tried to play with that horror trope. I liked the idea of something that could give you an opportunity to go back to a more youthful version of yourself in the physical sense and then secondarily, I liked the idea of maybe in a philosophical sense of having different paths you could take. You could take the wisdom you’ve accrued in the 70 or 80 years on this Earth and given a different opportunity you might take a different path and I think there’s something bewitching about that. But of course because it’s a book that I wrote, none of these were going to come to fruition in a good or beneficial way. Maybe in the short term they do but ultimately just because it’s a Cutter book, things have to go haywire.

PopHorror: Right?! I wouldn’t expect anything less. It didn’t really hit me how human my parents were until people my age started getting married and having kids and then realizing that this is what it was like for my parents. I never really thought about it before until people I knew started having kids.

Nick Cutter: Yeah, absolutely. I think my own children probably at this point see me and my wife the same way I viewed my own parents in that we’ve been fortunate not to have any serious injuries or illnesses. And I’m glad not just for my own sake but for their sake to have parental figures who are in good health and able to do the things that parents do. You can have parents who are infirmed for some reason and that doesn’t make them bad parents obviously, but just the idea of seeing them as someone invulnerable. It’s probably a pieceable thing for a child to have in general. Like I said, I’m round the corner of the half century mark for myself. There’s things that I don’t think my children notice, but I certainly notice it – the lived in sense of I can’t run as far or I can’t jump as high. Cognitively even every so often I’m misremembering things. You’re aware of your own – subtle ideally – deterioration. This wouldn’t be a book that I would have thought to have written when I was 20 or 30 even. It was so far away I think from anything I would think to sit down and write. But there’s a time for everything and I guess this is the time for this one.

PopHorror: I’m 45 and I feel that, so I get it.

Nick Cutter: Well, enjoy your youth now, Tiffany.

PopHorror: The last time we spoke, we talked about The Queen and you said that you enjoy research.

Nick Cutter: Yes!

PopHorror: The Dorians is another book that obviously a lot of research went into. There’s a lot of intricacies with the Hydra. How important was it to you to be as accurate as possible, given the liberties of the story?

Nick Cutter: That’s a good question. I’m not sure if I said this the last time we spoke but I’ll say it now potentially repeating myself. As a writer, I feel like you need to be ahead of 99% of your readers. That should be the hope. Ahead in terms of you know more than they do on the given topic that you’re deciding to write about. If there were some kind of researcher who worked on jellyfish, specifically the ones that I chose and interviewed for this, they’d be like, “C’mon man.” But the thing is, frankly, that’s a very small percentage of my readership, thankfully. In order to cast the spell I guess you’d say, your research needs to be up to the point that is beguiling enough and seems sensible enough and truthful and factual enough that it can maintain the spell for your readers.That’s really all you need to do. This sort of came from… Years ago, and I know that you’re American and I’m sure it was the same though, there was a point where these jellyfish were discovered. There’s two of them. There’s the Hydra and there’s one called the Medusa and they both have different mechanisms but they’re both biologically immortal as they say. Some shady drug companies got aware of this, and they thought, well, we’re going to try and market to people like the “you can be invulnerable and you can live forever like the jellyfish,” and it was like they were just grinding up jellyfish and putting them in capsules.

PopHorror: Wow.

Nick Cutter: But, you know, that would be like grinding up chameleons and thinking if you ate them, you could change the color of your skin. It just doesn’t work that way. We cannot take on the powers of different creatures by eating them, basically. 

PopHorror: You touch on that in the book too, when she’s like you just did the most ineffective method by eating them.

Nick Cutter: Right! It is generally, I suppose, like some drugs or whatever. Obviously, some pills that’s the way you’re meant to take them but in this specific case… I think the stem would be the other thing. It’s like yeah, it’s just going to go right through you and in fact, there’s no way. Our systems are so much more overdeveloped than a very simple organism like the Hydra. But I do find it fascinating and obviously, if you’re going to write a Fountain of Youth-type story, you’ve got to have some kind of hook and if you can’t actually have a Fountain of Youth, then if you’re going to try to hold to something that has at least some kind of scientific – very far flung – possibility… I know you talk to a lot of writers and creative people. It’s like, I think my mind is always kind of casting about for things like that or it’s always very receptive if I see something like that. I think, oh, scientifically that’s really interesting and where does that lead maybe as a story idea? Ninety-nine percent of them come in and they get dispelled because they just don’t cohere in enough ways that I want to spend a year writing it. But every so often and for reasons I can never really predict, tapeworms or wasps or in this case jellyfish, just have enough interest that I feel like I can mount a narrative on them.

PopHorror: I’m one of those that I’m not going to know if you’re being accurate or if it’s true.

Nick Cutter: I wouldn’t either. I thought Jurassic Park was a great one. Is it really possible? He did do some research and there had been some research around that time that you could take blood out of… We all know how Jurassic Park works on the science level and it turns out it’s actually impossible. But it’s reasonable enough that it’s like wow, what a freaking cool idea! It doesn’t need to be applicable in the real world, it just needs to be valuable in your book.

PopHorror: Absolutely. In the book, there are a lot of characters. You’ve got the core five, then the scientists, and then the two men John and Moses. Not all of them are very likable, that’s for sure. How do you create your characters and who was your favorite character to write?

Nick Cutter: How do I create them… It’s like a petri dish, maybe it is a good example or a good analogy to extend the scientific aspect. You put different random molecules that you think might have an interesting reaction to one another in there and you see how they clash off of each other and you see how they colonize within the little crucible that you’ve built for them. That may seem a little too antiseptic but you do want to have characters whose objectives bounce off of each other or the way that they’re pursuing their objectives bounce off of each other. You want to see characters who change over the course of a narrative, who enter the narrative in one way and then exit it very differently. And who, within the petri dish, brings out their best or worst aspects. I think most of them wouldn’t have entered the narrative unlikable. I think probably some of them exit it unlikable because they’re offered this absurd Faustian bargain that asks a lot of them and when they accept, at least as I can see, they didn’t really know what they were getting into, which is in the classic of the Frankenstein/Promethean bargain. You’re not really sure what the Devil’s given you and it’s so entrancing and in this case they’re so desperate and . want to believe. Then when they actually see it having a beneficial effect then it’s like taking away a drug from an addict and they see themselves collapsing if they’re not able to keep this thing. Then there’s the notion of the creature itself having its own agency in some weird way, in some primordial way and influencing their behavior. For me, it was like how much are they doing this and how much are they being influenced by the thing that they’ve taken on board with themselves? I think Frank probably is the everyman. He’s kind of like Max from The Troop. He’s the one who is the most stable. In a narrative he’s important. You generally need a character like that in a story like this. I like Claire. Claire would be one who was fun to write because she is one who probably changed the most. She came in, I would say, as a generally good-hearted human being but through the implementation of this thing and what she discovered that she wanted to do with her life as it had been radically changed and then what she was willing to do if that possibility got taken away from her. It changed her into a much different, more complicated, less morally pleasant human being. With my work, often characters go on that journey and I’m only too happy to take them on it sometimes.

PopHorror: I liked Frank a lot too. I think he was one of my favorites.

Nick Cutter: Teddy was fun to write too. Frankly, the scoundrel is always fun to write. My buddies always say that I’m like an 80-year-old walking around in a 50-year old’s body so whereas The Queen, it was quite difficult for me to get into a teenager’s mindset. It was actually easier for me to go up 30 years and inhabit the mindset and the verbiage and the conversational patterns of older people. I’ve always gravitated even when I worked, there would be a couple people at my summer jobs who were like the old men and women who were just doing it to stay busy. I would find myself having conversations with them and enjoying those conversations. I guess I’ve always found older people, there’s an appeal to them so it was only natural that at some point I was going to write a story based on older people.

PopHorror: Can you tell us about the moment that you knew you wanted to be a writer?

Nick Cutter: Wow! Well, my standard story, and forgive me if you’ve heard this already, but I was in grade 11 and I was an absolutely atrocious student. Just like completely bad and not interested in doing work and apathetic and class clown. I had an English teacher who decided to do a creative writing course, a specific creative writing course, at our school which was more of a technical school, a vocational school. She took it on herself of her own volition and probably put a lot of effort into after school. I was a huge reader, so I thought, okay, I’ll join this. I did it and wrote a few stories, and she came up to me, and she said, knowing who I was and knowing the book on me, “I’m shocked to be saying this, Craig, but you actually seem to have some ability at this. I say this as someone who never would have thought you’d ever have the ability at anything as a human being. So, this is quite surprising to me.” It wasn’t quite as offhand as that but I think there was genuine surprise in that she seemed to have discovered that I had something here. That kind of encouragement is more meaningful than gold. It’s more meaningful than almost anything else on Earth, really, and it has the power to, in my case, push me onto a career that I am now 35 years from that conversation, talking to you, having made a career out of it. So, yeah. That’s where it started and this is where it sits.

PopHorror: How did Craig Davidson become Nick Cutter? What made you decide to write under a pen name?

Nick Cutter: Back in that grade 11 class the things that I wrote for my teacher were more horror based and that was because I was a huge horror reader – King, Koontz, Barker, Rice, Shirley Jackson, and Joe Lansdale – of tons of the 80s and 90s horror canon. After my undergrad, I got into a university writing program, a Master’s program, and I had to write a thesis which was going to be a creative thesis but they were not going to be interested in me writing anything that was horrific. Back at that time, it just was not to be done, so I wrote abrasive good Canadian short stories and they got picked up and published so that put me on a quasi-literary track for a while. The idea to write a horror book had always been there. I don’t think I stumbled upon an idea that really hooked me but then I did. I had this experience where I saw a film loop of tapeworms and I was super struck by them. I thought they were kind of beautiful but at the same time single minded in their determination to do what they do. I wrote a book called The Troop kind of in a white heat and sent it to my agent and sat around gnawing at my fingernails thinking that he was going to say, “This is absolutely not what I took you on for. Good day.” But no, he liked it and he was able to place it in capable editorial hands, and that’s 10 years, 12 years later, here I am. Nick Cutter has sort of been that… I’d say it’s my side hustle but it’s really not. Craig Davidson is my side hustle. Nick Cutter is paying the bills.

PopHorror: I love that. My partner was like, “You can’t ask him why he writes under a pen name.” I was like, it’s not a secret! You look it up and you can see, so I googled, can you ask an author about their pen name, and it said yes.

Nick Cutter: No, no, you are not the first to ask and just telling you how much of a horror fan I am, I think one thing that’s always concerned me is that people would think, “Oh, he doesn’t want to put his own name to this stuff,” and that wasn’t it. To make a larger point, at the time, me and my agent had a discussion and the idea to separate the camps came down to the idea that there was a fear that readers couldn’t really fit it in their head that this person writes this stuff over here and this stuff over here and they’re very different from one another. It was really made as a bloodless business decision on that level and that sounds kind of sad, but at the same point, we had just had our first baby and had a mortgage to pay so you’re just thinking about the exigencies of life but at the same point, that last thing I wanted was for anyone to think that horror was slumming it or something because that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve always been a lifelong horror lover. It’s always been my first love. It’s just great that I’ve had an opportunity to spend the last 12 years writing about my first love.

PopHorror: People know exactly what they’re getting when they see a Nick Cutter book.

Nick Cutter: Yes!

PopHorror: They know when they see a Craig Davidson book that they’re getting something different. I know when I read a Nick Cutter book I’m going to get horror and most likely some kind of body horror, which I love. You had a third pen name too, is that right?

Nick Cutter: Well, he died a while ago. I had to put him in the dirt, but yes, he was the start of things, really. That stuff would make Nick Cutter look like Pollyanna, I suppose. After exhausting myself on King and Barker and that kind of mass market commercial horror, I certainly went, in my teenage years, into deeper and deeper recesses of horror in both film and books, and that guy, Lestewka, was patterned after some of the raunchiest horror that I read. It would probably be what they now call extreme horror except it’s not really. It was just gross. I think extreme horror, and this is no shade on extreme horror, but it probably traffics in stuff that I’ve never had a real interest in like aggressive sexual deviancy and stuff. It’s being very honest with itself as that’s what it is. It’s just that with mine, it was like how can I write some of the grossest stuff? You could say I’m doing that with Nick Cutter but I’m like no, this other stuff was juvenilely gross to the point that maybe Cutter is a bit more maturely gross. Let’s say that.

PopHorror: I’m intrigued now! You’ve piqued my interest.

Nick Cutter: I’m not ashamed of it. I wouldn’t say that. I would just say it was written in my early and mid-20s, and it was definitely written to shock, to be shocking, to be upsetting, to dial it up to 12. I kind of thought with some of the Cutter stuff I was doing that but I think I was that much older, I think I probably lost my fangs for doing the really, really nasty stuff. Now again, some readers would say they read Cutter and say that’s beyond the threshold of what they consider to be nasty. I agree with them. I don’t know about you, Tiffany, but it’s like eating chicken wings. Can you eat the suicidally hot chicken wings? I treated my reading and my movie watching in my teens as that, like how dark and hot… How much can I go to that line and then be repelled or not repelled? So, I think those kinds of books came out of that. By the time I was writing Cutter I was in my mid-30s so the appetite for that type of writing had bled out of me by then. 

PopHorror: I have just one last question for you today. If you had to survive in one of your books, which one would you have the best odds?

Nick Cutter: Oh, man. That’s a good one. I’ve never been asked that before. Do I get to count Craig Davidson books too, or just Nick Cutter?

PopHorror: Whatever you want to do.

Nick Cutter: Craig Davidson, there’s a couple. I could live in the Saturday Night Ghost Club. That’s basically my childhood, so that would be a cake walk. In the Cutter books, they all end so badly. I’m trying to think… Maybe Little Heaven because when I got to the cult, I’d be like what am I doing here? This is dumb, you guys are all brainwashed. So, maybe I would just turn around and walk out, and if the things in the woods didn’t get me, maybe I would just get out. That might be my best option. I’m just saying I’m not really interested in being a part of your group and I’m just going to leave.

Thank you so much to Nick for taking the time to chat with us. The Dorians is available now!