Interview With Nick Cutter, Author Of ‘The Queen’

Nick Cutter (aka Craig Davidson) is back with the terrifying The Queen, the gory, insect-infested body horror story we’ve all been waiting for. It’s deeply disturbing and disgusting, and you’ll probably have to take a shower after reading it because you can feel the bugs. Especially those ants!

On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town—even the police—think she’s dead.

And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story—the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly dreadful breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend—a person she never truly knew at all…

To celebrate the release of the book, I chatted with Nick about the inspiration for the book, childhood friendships, his experiences with bugs, horror books, and more!

PopHorror: I really loved The Queen. I’m super excited to talk to you about it.

Nick Cutter: Cool!

PopHorror: Body horror is my jam

Nick Cutter: There’s plenty of that in there for you.

PopHorror: Yes! What sparked the idea for The Queen?

Nick Cutter: On a personal level, what sparked it is I need to find something in the characters I can resonate with. There’s that time when you’re 18, 19 and the summer before, some of you are leaving for college or university and some of you are staying in town potentially. That divergent time in our lives where we are taking on adult responsibilities but maybe more or less, just these people that you’ve known for your entire life and you really thought would be in your life until you were dead. There’s this sudden schism and sudden breakage and you still think it will continue, that these friendships will continue and I supposed in some cases they do, but in my own experience, I was shocked and saddened I guess, by just how quickly two people can end up drifting apart from one another. It would be unbelievable if you traveled back from the future and said to your 17 year old self, “You and this person who you’ve known since childhood are not really going to be close by the time you’re 22.” I would say you’re crazy. I think that was one of the major points that I needed to latch onto during the editing process between the two main characters in the book, to sort of feel a resonance with the narrative and with their journey, not during the plot part of it but really the lead up to and their friendship that had elapsed before the book even starts.

PopHorror: You and I are fairly close in age, so when we were 17 or 18, it was unheard of… I never would have imagined that my best friend at the time and I would not be friends a year from then or a year from graduation. I think it’s different now because of social media. It’s easier to keep in touch. Back then, there were no cell phones.

Nick Cutter: Yeah!

PopHorror: We were on AOL, and it was brand new and nothing like Facebook. It was heartbreaking when you lost touch with a friend, especially one that had been such a huge part of your life for however long.

Nick Cutter: Yeah, and you go away, and I think we realize now at our age that you’re not even a full person at that point, you know? The things you could find agreement on as eight-year-olds, as 10-year-olds, 15-year-olds, are not the same things that ultimately might define your life as an adult. That’s saddening too, that you realize you can come to different viewpoints about the world and that also sends a schism into your friendship. I do agree with social media too, and how that probably must help foster relationships, but distance is complicated. Like not being able to just walk down the street and see a friend or agree to meet at a coffee shop or a bar or whatever, and then you’re making new friends in those places. If you stay, maybe you’re strengthening friendships with people who you weren’t as close to but you latch onto, and if you go away, you’re kind of forced into making these new friendships because you don’t want to be alone really. So, you just develop these separate social spheres. It’s all natural. It happens every single day. It’ll happen to my own children, I’m sure at some level. But it still doesn’t, as you said, it doesn’t stop it from being heartbreaking in a weird way because you had this strong belief when you were young that you’d just always be friends.

PopHorror: I definitely feel that because I grew up in Ohio and I moved to Arizona, and I’ve been out here longer than I lived in Ohio at this point. My best friend is still back in Ohio, but I do have good friends here too. It would be preposterous to even think that I would live out here for over 20 years and not make new friends. You’re right, you kind of have to for survival or I’d be sitting here alone. You have to do it or you’re not living.

Nick Cutter: No, exactly. Especially, I think too, like you said after graduation you’re at that point in your life where you’re exploring new things, you’re taking on new ambitions, you’re exploring new viewpoints. It’s like, friendships are part of it. The friendships I have from high school are strong still to this day, but as are the ones I made at university. They’re different units. Sometimes I’d bring a high school buddy up to visit at university and my university buddies… It was like the ocean meeting the lake. Like these are the two different spheres. If a buddy of mine brought a buddy they had from high school, it was like, “Well, it’s nice to meet you but we’re kind of doing this thing over here.” Anyways, it was a really big part of the book and in order to do my best to write from a teenage perspective, you kind of want to do your best to go back. Like I dragged out all my old yearbooks. I went back to my old high school.

PopHorror: Wow!

Nick Cutter: Yeah, it’s not too far away. I live in Toronto and my old high school is an hour and a half away so that wasn’t arduous. It really did help. The sense memories of just walking the hallway, which seems to smell the exact same it did when I was there. Maybe that doesn’t change. A lot of that helped pull me back – the sights, the smells, everything – as best I could. I wrote this when I was in my mid-40s trying to recapture a time that was 3 decades in my past. Largely, it’s an impossibility but you do your best.

PopHorror: I thought you did pretty good, especially teenage girls although I don’t know what it’s like these days but I’m sure pretty similar.

Nick Cutter: Okay, cool. I appreciate that. I did try and just focus on some of the universal touchstones, like what we’ve just been speaking about. You and I both have the same general experience. You moving from Ohio to Arizona, me moving away to university. It’s not a boy or a girl thing, it’s a universal thing.

PopHorror: Absolutely. Obviously, a lot of research about bugs and bees and creepy crawly things went into this book. What was your research and preparation process like?

Nick Cutter: I’ve always kind of been, Tiffany, like a researcher. I kind of enjoy that. I’ve always thought as a writer, you don’t need to be smart, thank God. But you need to be a little bit more aware of the subject than your supposed reader. I just need to be a little bit ahead in terms of the research that I’ve done that it can hopefully weave a web and a world for the reader. Of course, if you’ve got someone who’s an expert in that discipline, they’re going to be way ahead of me and thus maybe that sort of spell won’t hold for them. But in order to get that just little bit ahead, that requires to sit down and do research. But again, I love research and again, I don’t know where the obsession with bugs comes from but clearly, with the Cutter books, they have a fair amount of influence and you could press me on that and I wouldn’t really know where that comes from because it’s not like I… Sorry, you know what? I did have one experience. Geeze. I had this lizard back when I was a kid. A leopard gecko. And you had to feed it crickets. My buddy, one day, came with me and we went to the pet store and they put them in a plastic bag and puff it up full of air, and you bring the poor insects home for dinner. I had it up on my nightstand, the terrarium, and I leaned down to do something and my buddy thought it would be a hilarious moment to upend the bag of crickets on my head. Which, you know, just hilarity ensued, all sorts of laughs and giggles. None of that. I was really upset and feeling a dozen crickets tangling in my hair and going down my collar and crawling about. There are experiences like that and thank goodness crickets are harmless, but maybe something like that? I kicked an ant hill when I was a kid, like a lot of idiotic boys and thought it was hilarious until halfway up my thigh I felt just an absolute industry of defending ants. I guess those things have something to do with it outside of the research and the fact that these things show up in my books so much.

PopHorror: I know nothing about any of it, so I couldn’t imagine researching all of this. This is obviously a work of fiction with sci-fi and horror. How important was it to be accurate as much as possible while taking creative liberties?

Nick Cutter: There might be an insect expert, a wasp expert, who would unravel a great number of the claims that I make in the book, not really claims but the research that I…  Thank goodness I’m under no… I’m not going to have an educational board scrutinize it on what may or may not be true or false. One thing that I really did find interesting in my research was this notion of queen mandibular pheromone – QMP – which is really something that is used in wasps and honey bees. The queen will use it to influence the behavior or even I think she can change the sex of a drone like back and forth. So this kind of power, if say you had it or I had it, the idea that you can influence… My son is, I don’t know, two miles away at school and if he’s misbehaving right now, I could send a signal to make him do what I want him to do. Or vice versa he could do that to me. I made him go to bed and he makes me walk outside in the snow or something like that. In the insect world it’s done all the time, it’s just a part of maintaining stasis and harmony in those kingdoms. But if you applied it to humankind, it’s like the worst kind of manipulation and it’s amoral.

PopHorror: And scary! I don’t want to see this happen.

Nick Cutter: Me neither!

PopHorror: If The Queen was to be made into a movie, who would you cast as Plum, Cherry, and Harry?

Nick Cutter: Oh, man, that’s a great question! Geeze. You know, that’s such a good question and here’s the thing. I’m going to just say that I don’t have enough. I don’t know enough young actors right now.

PopHorror: I hear that a lot!

Nick Cutter: It would be the same if you were to say The Troop, who would you like to have as those characters. I probably wouldn’t be able to think of five young characters. The cast of Stranger Things has aged out. You can’t do Millie Bobby Brown anymore. She’s too old to play… At the time, I would have said yeah, Millie Bobby Brown maybe, or I go back to my own time. I’m trying to think of the actors I grew up watching. Some of the kids from Stand by Me you might want to use. Honestly, I have no idea who they’d cast. My movie agents are sending it out and they’ve got some actresses they want to send it to, some actors and I’m like, I’m sure they’re awesome, I just have no idea who they are. And I shouldn’t. I’m almost 50. I’m not making the culture anymore. I’m driving the culture, I’m part of the cohort that is now just like ideally still receptive to culture and sometimes culture just seems baffling to me.

PopHorror: What are you currently reading?

Nick Cutter: What am I currently reading… What do I have going on right now? I’m actually reading an old, old book called Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. I ordered that online. It’s horrific in its own way. But in terms of horror, what’s the last one that I read that I really liked? I’m looking over at my bookshelf and just kind of itemizing stuff. I read CJ Leede’s newest.

PopHorror: I did too!

Nick Cutter: Yeah, American Rapture. I thought that was excellent. And The Devil by Name I have other there, by Keith Rosson. That was another one recently that I read that I really enjoyed. I’ve been reading quite a bit of horror. Often you get them and you’re asked to do blurbs and I’m happy to do so, so I get an opportunity to read some of these books before they’re unleashed. Those are two that I read recently sort of in the blurb format that were particularly resonant.

PopHorror: American Rapture is so good! What is up next for you?

Nick Cutter: What’s up next… I have a book under my own name that I’m putting the… I don’t know, you say finishing touches but then there’s seven other edits to come. That I’m working on and then I’ve got two other Cutter books under contract that ideally, we should have out next year and the year after. So, a lot of work coming out. It’s nice to be busy.

PopHorror: That’s exciting! I’m excited for what’s coming up for us. Just one last question for you. If you could program a horror double feature with any two films, what would they be?

Nick Cutter: Wow, that’s great! I’ll go with the two that probably scared me the most when I was a kid. I’m not breaking any new ground here. A lot of people would say the same, but I’ll go with The Exorcist and the one that scared me most recently – which is a lot harder to do at my age – Hereditary.

Thank you so much to Nick for taking the time to chat with us. The Queen is available now at your favorite bookstore.