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 trying to keep them out. There is, however, 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, the CEO of a mining company. The trauma left him a bit unhinged, but also deeply interested in the insect world and its peculiar ways. Rudyard is a major part of the story, the cause of most of the trouble and a great character, rather like a classic Bond villain.

After the prologue hooks you, the tale begins in a low-key fashion, with Margaret Carpenter unexpectedly receiving an iPhone. 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 some time. She grew up in the trailer next to Margaret’s, and they have been best friends 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, the author’s hometown, so there is a strong sense of place throughout 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 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 terms 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 Cutter’s 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, the third-person narration for Rudyard Crate, and the use of brand names and everyday objects to ground the story in reality are all techniques associated with King that other writers have wisely adopted. The other thing this story has, a quality 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 heading.

Our heroine, Margaret Carpenter, is also a writer. She won a prize for a short story and observes that writers read and enjoy other stories, then want to see whether they can perform the same stunts or pull off the same tricks in their own work. Nick Cutter has succeeded admirably in doing exactly that.

This is 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/