The Queen by Nick Cutter (book review)
I read ‘The Queen’ in mid-July, just as the first wasps began to appear in southern England, a good time for insect horror. Nobody likes wasps, do they? Environmentalists tell us they’re essential to the ecosystem and there’s always someone around to say, ‘He won’t bother you if you don’t bother him’ which isn’t true but most people hate them. The stripy little swines feature heavily in the prologue where our heroine Margaret Carpenter is trapped in a room and trying to keep them out but there is much more to the story than wasps.
There are ants. Mad billionaire Rudyard Crate had a terrible experience with ants in Africa when he was there with his sister and his father, CEO of a mining company. The trauma left him a bit crazy but also deeply interested in the insect world and their funny ways. Rudyard is a large part of the story, the cause of all the trouble and a great character, like a classic Bond villain.
After the prologue hooks you, the tale begins in a low-key way with Margaret Carpenter having an iPhone delivered unexpectedly. She turns it on and messages from her best friend, Charity Atwater, appear on the screen, directing her where to go and what to do. Charity and three boys from Northfield High have been missing for a while. She grew up in the trailer next to Margaret and they have been besties since childhood, though perhaps not so much lately, as Margaret’s family suddenly became rich and moved to a better area.
Margaret’s first task is to fetch Harry Cook, another friend, and they use his old car to travel around the town of Saint Catherine’s, Ontario, which is the author’s hometown, so there’s a strong sense of place in the novel. Through developments in the present and frequent flashbacks to incidents in the past, we slowly discover the close relationship between the friends, as well as the conflicts and rivalries at their local high school, where the rich boys and the pretty girls didn’t have much time for poor old Charity. The themes are modern: slut-shaming, fat-shaming, judgement, triggering and healing. We didn’t have those in my school days but the horror works better because the author has it happen to sympathetic, imperfect characters you can believe in.
A gruesome, slightly fantastical story about an unpopular girl at high school is bound to remind readers of Stephen King’s work but Nick Cutter (alias Craig Davidson) won’t mind that at all. He mentions the similarity himself in the acknowledgements. King praised his previous book, ‘The Troop’, as old-school horror but not for the faint-hearted. That is certainly true of ‘The Queen’ which features several grisly scenes. The writing style, the italics for thoughts, the tight first-person narration for Margaret Carpenter, third person for Rudyard Crate, the mention of brand names and everyday objects to ground the story in reality, all these are King methods that other writers have wisely adopted. The other thing this story has, a trait mentioned by King’s writer character in ‘Misery’, is the ‘Gotcha!’ After a while, it’s hard to put down. You want to know what happens next, even when you can see with grim inevitability where the story is headed.
Our heroine Margaret Carpenter is also a writer. She won a prize for a short story and mentions that writers read and enjoy other stories, then want to see if they can perform the same stunts or pull off the same tricks in their own works. Nick Cutter has succeeded in this admirably. A gripping yarn but definitely not for the faint-hearted. It won’t make you like wasps, ants or billionaires, but who does?
Eamonn Murphy
July 2026
(pub: Arcadia/Quercus, 2025. 368 page hardback. Price: £20.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-52944-363-9. Ebook: £5.99 (UK))
check out websites: www.quercusbooks.co.uk and www.hachette.co.uk/titles/nick-cutter-2/the-queen/9781529443660/
