Nick Cutter: A Quiet Reign of Terror

by Kate Foster Curtis-Hawkins

Stephen King, Grady Hendrix, Joe Hill, Augustina Bazterrica, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, and T. Kingfisher. These are some of the names that you would expect to see on anyone’s list of modern horror icons, or in the horror section at your local bookstore, but there’s one name in particular missing from the above list that I feel deserves more recognition: Nick Cutter. 

Now, I am aware that Nick Cutter is not a completely obscure author who’s been confined to the world of indie publishing, but I do feel that he is under-represented in the landscape of promotion and availability–a fact which feels particularly egregious when we are currently living through a renaissance in the popularity of horror regardless of the medium. He’s published eight titles in twelve years, and yet my local independent bookstores don’t carry his work, and neither do my local Barnes & Noble locations. 

Even though I am a fan of his work, I did not know that he had a book released in May of this year. It would appear Simon & Schuster have done little to promote it. Only three Reddit threads have been made about it on the Horrorlit board–all of which have less than 100 comments or upvotes–and there are zero reviews of it available from mainstream outlets. 

In fact, your correspondent was not even able to procure a copy of the book in time to read it this month. By all accounts, it would appear that The Dorians was dumped into the market and left to fend for itself, much like the titular Boy Scouts in Cutter’s first novel, The Troop, which will form the basis of my plea for you to read Cutter’s work. 

What makes Nick Cutter such an interesting writer in the landscape of horror is a mixture of his background and his influences. He began his career as a Literary Fiction author publishing under his birth name: Craig Davidson. He saw moderate success in that landscape, being shortlisted for the Giller Prize for his second novel, Cataract City, but only a year later he would begin publishing horror at a near-prolific pace, bringing his Literary Fiction sensibilities into the world of genre. 

He also seems, at least to me, to represent a blending of the subject matter and styles of two of the most important authors working in the horror genre in the last half of the Twentieth Century: Stephen King and Clive Barker. King’s influence is particularly evident on The Troop as Cutter himself admits to borrowing structural elements from Carrie for his novel, but the body horror elements in this freshman effort as Nick Cutter are pure Barker. 

The horror in this novel comes in the form of genetically modified tapeworms that multiply rapidly and grow at an alarmingly fast rate, burrowing into the bodies of those who become infected, driving them to eat obsessively and infect more hosts. There are plenty of fluids, possessions, rending of flesh, and sexual undertones which squarely place the novel into the canon of body horror that Barker expanded greatly through his Books of Blood. 

On its face, The Troop could be described as a standard boyhood-loss-of-innocence tale that Stephen King, and many others, have written numerous times. However, Cutter’s sensibilities from the world of Literary Fiction make it something far greater. His structural experimentation–made up of lab notes, journals, courtroom testimony, and fictional news articles interweaved with the main story–may have been borrowed from Carrie, but it is utilized in The Troop to greater effect. In Cutter’s work, these supplemental chapters build something like a matryoshka doll of experiments, which gradually widen the frame of reference to show the reader different ways that knowledge is gained or information is controlled.

At the smallest level, you have the individual experiments of the boys that make up our cast of characters. Some of them literally experiment on animals, others experiment with power dynamics, some experiment with their impulses, and still others experiment with their identities–but each of them is trying something. At the next level, you have the scientists experimenting with the genetic code of the hydatid worms that will become the principal antagonists of the book. Above that, the island stands as an experiment in the effectiveness of those worms, and at the highest level Cutter gives an analysis to how information is manipulated to influence what the public views as true or false. 

The Troop opens with an article posted to a conspiracy website in which the fictional writer claims that something “evil” is afoot on Prince Edward Island after a car is stolen from a diner. This introductory supplement would not be out of place on something like InfoWars, which instantly places the reader into a position in which we are meant to question everything presented to us. A mindset that will become valuable the further into the book you get. 

Within the nesting doll structure of the novel, nothing is as it seems: Characters lie, they manipulate, they misunderstand, and they make mistakes. All of which gets represented with larger and larger consequences at each level of the framework that Nick Cutter is creating. As such, we can easily see how the individual experimentation of the boys in Troop 52 leads to the death of their own innocence by way of their transformation into adults. Moreover, the book examines what it means to engage in experimentation as an adult and how the impact becomes so much greater than when you’re a child. 

“A grown up’s mind–even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim–lacked that elasticity. The World had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying ‘Bloody Mary’ three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity. 

Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the ‘right people,’ whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child–leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. 

Or maybe there is: you just grow up. 

And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things–but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed…well they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by the fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening.” 

That is the moment in which everything Nick Cutter is doing thematically clicks into place for me, and the seriousness with which he treats the subject of growing into an adult through the lens of the body horror he has created is reason alone to buy this book. 

I won’t pretend that this is a perfect book, because it isn’t. Cutter’s voice and narration is a bit too inconsistent throughout the book, and his depiction of boys in their early teens sometimes strains credulity. Sometimes they think and reason like much older kids. I don’t think many fourteen year olds know how to properly use an em dash or can theorize on the death of their own innocence, but multiple fourteen year olds in this book can. Despite this, the subject matter at play is compelling, and the influence of Cutter’s time spent writing outside the world of genre fiction gives him a style that stands out from a lot of other horror writing being published today. 

If The Troop is not for you, the body horror and animal abuse can be quite graphic after all, then there are plenty of other books for you to choose from: The Deep is about the investigation into a lost undersea research team, The Acolyte is about a religious police force that hunts down heretics, Little Heaven is about a cult that worships an eldritch being, The Queen deals with class consciousness and a missing persons investigation, and now we have The Dorians: A novel about the elderly, death, and dying. There is truly something for everyone in his bibliography, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand why he is not better known. 

So perhaps, in the aftermath of the Halloween season, you should try and find a copy of one of his works. I guarantee you it’ll be worth your time.