With "The Queen," Nick Cutter has mastered the art of creepy-crawly horror | Audible.ca
With "The Queen," Nick Cutter has mastered the art of creepy-crawly horror
The bestselling author unpacks it all: why he uses a pen name, the challenges of writing a modern teen perspective, the fun of writing villains, and more.
Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Nicole Ransome: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Nicole, and I'm happy to welcome horror author Nick Cutter, known for his major bestsellers like and . Nick Cutter is here to unpack his newest, multi-cast listen, . Welcome, Nick.
Nick Cutter: Thank you so much for having me, Nicole.
NR: It's great to have you. The Queen is a story that takes place over the course of one insane day, however the background characters cover a lot of that background information that we get about the rest of the characters. With this in mind, how did you determine how you were going to structure your story?
NC: Well, I did like the idea of trying to put it in one day. I guess it really crosses over into a couple days, as it turns out, but the main meat of the narrative would be elapsing within one day, with time signatures. Like, 7:05 in the morning. Next chapter is 7:15. And sort of trying to get that kind of propulsiveness that I thought would suit a thriller, a horror book.
But you're right, I'm interested in characters, and one of the difficult things to do in a book, especially when you're trying to put it within the time frame of a single day, is to really properly break open those relationships and look at their histories. Especially in my case, you're dealing with the history of two girls who've grown up together from essentially infancy forward. So, you really want to dwell on that relationship, and it's sort of the heart of the book, really. They're reaching this point in their lives, their last summer before one of them ends up going away to university. I think that's kind of a universal sense for a lot of us, that time in our lives is the first time that you're parting with people that you've grown up with. Really sadly, some bad feelings can come out of that, even though they're just normal feelings and it's a normal progression that some of us will leave the city we were born in and some of us will stay behind.
But in any case, because there was so much to unpack, there were points in the narrative where I went back into flashback, which is a technique I've used before and obviously a technique that authors use all the time. And you had to do a fairly careful dance by trying to continue the propulsive, forward-charging aspect of the narrative while actually going back into these old pools of backstory where you could flesh out the relationship between some of these characters to one another, or in the case of my villain, the backstory as to how he came to this insane idea that he ends up embarking on that provides the other part of the narrative.
NR: The story features very interesting characters, like Harry, Margaret, Rudyard. Did you have a lot of fun coming up with this cast of characters?
NC: I did. I always like to think that, for me, character generally comes first. Actually, it always comes first. The plot will come in on the heels of finding some characters that you think you can identify with and you feel like following through the course of an 80,000-word novel, more or less. I would say, Nicole, like every novel, especially after you've written a few of them, you can tell going into them, “Okay, these are going to be the challenges that this novel holds.” Because the conception sort of states those things for you. And for me, I was writing as a mid-40-something writer, deciding to go back and write from the perspective of teenagers. I've written from the perspective of young people before, and this was specifically a teenage girl, the main narrator. You just knew that was going to be a hurdle. I tried to look at it other ways. I almost tried to tell myself that I could come at it from a different vector or choose a different character, something that wouldn't be quite so challenging, but the book didn't unlock itself from that perspective, so I was sort of forced, almost, to write from this perspective.
So, you knew that was going to be a hurdle. To try, from the perspective of 30 years forward in my life as a 40-something, to go back to that time, even in my own life. I mean, that's three decades worth of mental fog. And the further you get away from that point in your life, the further those images retreat, those memories retreat, and you had to find a way as best you could to bring them into the present so you could write from them, at least with a level of what you felt to be like convincingness. Some of it was as simple as going back to my hometown, which is where this novel is set, and driving around the streets and going back to my old high school. And then you're dragging out the dusty old yearbooks and going through them, which was a lot of fun, first of all. And nostalgic and kind of bittersweet and melancholy, all those things. But it did have, I think, the benefit of pulling me a little bit further from where I am to where I was, and allowing me to re-embrace my own history a little bit, and ideally taking from that perspective to be able to write a little more convincingly from the perspective of youth.
NR: Great answer. It actually leads into my next question. So, you mentioned that you went back to your hometown to I guess reinvigorate some nostalgic memories. What did you do to get inside the mind of the teenage Margaret?
NC: Well, it was difficult. One of the other choices I made was, first of all, to avoid the pandemic altogether, even though that was somewhat the period in which I was writing the book. But I felt like I wanted to set it in 2018. I'm still updating it a great deal; I'm pulling it way forward into the chronology from 1994, when I was the age that Margaret Carpenter was. But I couldn't see myself setting it back when I was that age because it just didn't seem to cohere on a scientific level.
"Writing from the villain's perspective... is quite liberating and quite fun."
I think the main thing that I tried to do is that you try and dwell on the universal. There are certain aspects of human existence that I believe are, I hope are, genderless, essentially. Like the idea of leaving home and the idea of two friends finding themselves at that crossroads where two people who felt like they were going to be friends for their entire lives suddenly, and it is quite suddenly, come upon this place where it's like, "Oh, my God, we are going to be apart for the first time ever." And you do the same things that I think we all do, which is what I did, I went away to university and a lot of my friends stayed back home in my hometown. And it was like, "We'll call every day. I'll come home on the weekends and I'll be home in the summer. It'll be like nothing will ever change." But then you go away and they stay and new friendships develop.
You realize, too, at 18, you're not a fully formed individual. Ultimately, your outlooks can diverge and you become very different people, as is natural, from the people you were at 7 or 10 or 12 or 17, when you were growing up. And then you see yourself five years later, you run into each other on the street and you're sort of shocked by the gulf that has developed between you two. This idea of two people who used to have sleepovers four nights a week and were in each other's pockets and never separated from one another could be so distant from one another is actually really heartbreaking, but it's a normal passage of human existence for a lot of us.
So, for me, I think it was important to dwell on those aspects of life that felt uncentered from being a boy or a girl or that sort of notion. I mean, there's a scene in it, the first time a boy and girl have sex with one another. I went back to my own feelings at that time, which was I was nervous. It wasn't like it was in movies and on TV. I felt weird about showing my body to somebody else for the first time in that way. I don't know if that's universal, right? The person who I shared that experience with, we haven't spoken in quite a while. But I'd like to hope if we did sit down at some point as adults and speak to one another that there would be that kind of similarity, potentially, in the way that that experience elapsed for both of us. Although, there would be some concrete differences based on gender, I'm sure. But at least you're hoping that it's close enough to a universal resonance that your own experience of it can cross those lines a little bit and feel resonant to whoever happens to read it.
NR: There's also another character that you dig into his background a bit, quite a bit. There's Rudyard. What was it like writing from his perspective? He is a character who has gone through quite a lot, I will say [laughs]. Quite a lot. What was that like getting into his backstory and his general character?
NC: Right. Well, I think readers would be shocked, and I'm not sure if this is just me or if this is something that you would find some universality amongst writers when you talk to them. But writing from the villain's perspective, and Rudyard is sort of the de facto villain of this piece, is quite liberating and quite fun. To write from a perspective that is in some ways so divorced from the normal morality of humans that most of us go through our lives holding and needing to hold in order to be a functional member of society.
Not to spoil anything, Nicole, but the creature, let's say, that Rudyard has come up with in this book, one of the hardest hurdles for me was like, “Why in God's name would anybody want to do this?” And yet I just had such an instinct and idea that it would be fun if somebody did, because of the plot fun that could happen. But you had to unlock a rationale for it. My first feeling was, “Well, okay, if he's interested in space exploration, creating some kind of a life-form that could exist in differing pressures and gravities and sort of not thwarted with all the sort of sticky human failings, that would be interesting.” But it just didn't quite work in my head, so then I said, "What is the most absurd trauma that he could suffer as a young boy that in its inception could send him hurdling on this terrible digressive path to creating this thing that he's creating?"
And so that allowed me to find that fundamental experience in his past. Which, again, probably not worth spoiling, but there's something really hideous that happens to him and to his sister. The outpouring of that gives him his reason for living, really, and the reason for embarking on this bizarre scientific journey that he ends up creating and ends up putting in motion everything else that happens in the plot.
NR: Wow. So, I found Charity to be very interesting as a character. When I figured out her backstory, there's actually a comparison that I would make to her from a movie that I used to love back when I was younger called Species.
NC: Oh, yeah, sure. I remember Species. Natasha Henstridge, the Canadian actor.
NR: Well, see. There you go. I love that movie. Can you tell us how you crafted Charity's backstory?
NC: I can. It's not even spoilers, it's much more a sense of wanting to be as respectful as I can to actual lived history that exists in my life. There were three elements of this book that really came from my own background. Only one of them, and I've already spoken about that, has come from my own real lived history. But there are two other things that happened in my hometown when I was growing up. I set the book in St. Catharines, Ontario. I live here in Toronto, so it's about an hour and a half down, towards Buffalo, actually. When I was going to high school in the 1990s there was a serial killer in our town named Paul Bernardo. Weird fact is that where my parents live now, in the Port Dalhousie neighborhood of St. Catharines, you can go out to the end of their driveway and look south and about 500 yards off is Paul Bernardo's old house. It's been gutted to the studs and rebuilt, but the actual place was there, and it's a very bucolic sort of lovely old neighborhood. But a monster happened to live there. He murdered two young girls.
This is where my own memory, as I said, 30 years on, it's full of holes. Memories just generally are. You’re sure you remember something perfectly and then you talk to a couple buddies who lived through the same thing and you discover that all your stories are different. They share certain small commonalities, but you'd be shocked at the differences in them. So, in this case, my belief was when I started writing this book, before I even really researched it, just going through my own memories, was that of the two [girls], one of them came from a well-to-do, wealthy family and the other came from less monetary means, and that they were memorialized differently because of that. It's like, but how could that be, right? These are both young people whose lives were cut short and whose possibilities should be the same. Because you're young, and if you're young, then of course it's blue skies and open horizons for all of us, as it should be. But it was like everybody had a story about this one girl, and then there was the other girl. In my head, it coalesced that it was because of the difference in their class, essentially. And so I wrote it from that perspective. I wrote it as a perspective of, when there's two deaths in a smaller town, class distinctions will make up the difference in how they might be memorialized.
As it turns out, after I wrote the book, I sort of belatedly did research, and I'm really not sure that that difference exists in real life. I want to make sure that that's known, because these are real people with families who still continue to live and mourn their children. But that was what formed who I thought Charity was and the fact that she wasn't believed, I guess, in the case that we're speaking about. And that her having gone missing is sort of unremarked, really, within the populous, whereas these other boys who go missing within the story, they come from rich backgrounds and it's like such a tragedy. Even though maybe in my own existence, how I explained it, that might not be the case, I do think, overall, societally there's probably some real validity to the notion that wealth substratas create a difference between how people are memorialized or how hard people start looking for somebody once they do go missing.
NR: Yeah. It makes her reaction so much more human, I will admit. You kind of understand her frustrations and where she comes from. Even with her own best friend, even with Margaret. I love her character. You don't want her to be a villain. And then you also know that she can't be a hero. But at the same time, she's just a really good, well-rounded character.
NC: She was almost never given an opportunity to be a hero. Right from inception, really, that was not part of the cards for her. But I agree, and she was an interesting character to write and somewhat difficult because she never actually appears. You, having read the book, you understand. When she appears, it's really in a different guise. And everything that you learn about her or she delivers to the audience is through audiotapes or that sort of a thing. And there are some flashbacks and so forth. But it was interesting writing a character who actually, in the flesh, so to speak, never makes an appearance within the text.
NR: One thing that I really found terrifying but also very enthralling about this story is the vivid details of the bugs. I am a huge scaredy-cat when it comes to bugs.
NC: Me too.
NR: Between the ants and the wasps, I felt the hairs raising on my arm. So, what was your favorite scene to write when it came to the bugs?
NC: Well, I knew there were a few signpost scenes that I was going to get to, and sort of weirdly cackling in my own absurd way about having the opportunity to write them. One thing that I did a lot of research on, the ants. The scene with the ants and Rudyard and his sister was probably the most fun for me to write. I have to give credit to a couple inspirations there. One is this story called “Leiningen Versus the Ants,” which was published in Esquire I think back in the 1940s. It used to be taught in schools. Not when I was going to school. By then I think it had become kind of culturally outmoded. It is definitely culturally outmoded at this point, so it doesn't belong in schools anymore. But it was basically just this story about this guy trying to protect his property from these rampaging ants. And then I discovered like, “Wow, there's a lot of ant stories.” H.G. Wells wrote a story about ants. You might remember 's . It kicked off this, in the 70s, suddenly there were crab books and rampaging slugs and just everything under the surface of the sun became this creepy thing that you would write a book about them infesting humanity and cities.
"Societally there's probably some real validity to the notion that wealth substratas create a difference between how people are memorialized or how hard people start looking for somebody once they do go missing."
And then my brother and I watched a show called MacGyver back in the ’80s. And there was one episode where MacGyver was tasked with protecting this lab in the jungle from ants. Which I realized, “Oh, this is very clearly ‘Leiningen Versus the Ants.’ It's ‘MacGyver Versus the Ants.’” But that night, my brother and I were trying to get to sleep and every contact our head made with the pillow or the sheets made with our skin, it was like, “Ah! It's ants. It's ants. Ants are everywhere.” [laughs] And so I never forgot that feeling.
I mean, ants are great, frankly. They're very industrious, wonderful little creatures. But you get a trillion of them and they're hungry, well, no one wants to deal with that. So, I had a delightful time writing that particular scene, and I enjoyed writing the wasp stuff, and I certainly enjoyed researching all of it. I really like to get down deep into the nitty-gritty of insect behavior.
NR: In your research, did you find anything especially interesting that you learned about bugs that has haunted you to this day?
NC: Well, one thing I did put in there was there's something that wasp queens produce called the QMP, queen mandibular pheromone. Were human beings to have that ability, you could make anybody do your bidding from a great distance. I could reach out to my daughter who is over at school and if she was misbehaving, I could make her be quiet, or whatever, sit still. So, put in human clothing, it's an awful, immoral thing to have that kind of power over another living thing. But in the insect world, that stuff happens all the time. It's really used to maintain continuity and equilibrium in a nest or in a hive. So, it's really useful for them. But taking that skill and transferring over to us, I mean, it's blackly amoral.
NR: So, this isn't the first time you've explored the horrifying nature of bugs, nor described it. You've also included creepy-crawlies in your Audible Original . You touched on it in as well. What keeps you coming back to bugs?
NC: I wish I knew, Nicole. There's nothing like being a writer, or probably a creative person in general, to discover your obsessions and your fixations, because you go back to them much like a honey bee to a pollinating bud. You just sort of find yourself drawn back to them inevitably, it seems. I mean, with the Cutter books, broadly, there's two ways that they go. They either go towards the promethean mad scientists—somebody's messing with the laws of nature and it backfires on them in a spectacular way, and there are some poor humans stuck in the middle of that who have to bear the brunt of it. Or it's sort of the eldritch, Lovecraftian horror that stands above a more human despot. When I'm writing under Nick Cutter and when I'm writing these books, those seem to be the two directions that I flow in.
But as to why creepy-crawlies, I'm not like Howard Hughes. I'm not terrified if I find an ant in my house or whatever. I don't lay in fear of these things, but they obviously form a deep fascination within me that is kind of inexplicable. I wish I knew. But maybe it's best not to dive too deep into that pool of my psyche.
NR: Okay. Well, just to touch the surface of it [laughs], what would you rather be stuck in a room with, the ants or the wasps?
NC: [Laughs] Well, it depends how many, I guess. You know what I hate the worst is a millipede. I think they're my least favorite. I mean, all bugs feel like they're alien, but I think a millipede feels almost like it comes from an evil alien planet that means all harm to humanity or almost anything that it comes in contact with. So, for me, I would take ants or wasps over a room full of millipedes. Oof.
NR: Mine is roaches.
NC: Oh, roaches!
NR: Oh my gosh. Like, there's that Creepshow—
NC: Yes. I've seen it. Of all Creepshow, that whole film series, that's my favorite vignette of all.
NR: It is. Same for me. Because it actually gives me goosebumps. So, The Queen is performed by four different narrators that voice the different perspectives. This is also your first multi-cast narration. Why did you decide to use multiple narrators for this story?
NC: I think, being in the first person, you obviously need a good Margaret. That's a tough one to manage. I think Ariel [Blake]'s done an excellent job with it, and I'm grateful for that. But then we have Rudyard's sections in third person, but they're essentially first person still. You're very much present in his mind. And Corey Brill has done every single Nick Cutter book since the first, and he's actually crossed over and done some of the books under my own name. People love Corey. They seem to really take to his narration of my work. And so when I was asked, "Who?" I said, "Well, if we can get Corey, I think that you just got to keep that streak going."
The other two gentlemen did some of the sections at the end. I think they've done an excellent job as well. So, I think just this one needed those extra narrative voices, especially distinguishing between Margaret and Rudyard. I think it's worked out really, really well and I think everyone's done just an excellent vocal performance.
NR: I was going to ask you about your working relationship with Corey Brill, because I did note that he has been a main narrator for most of your listens. What draws you to his performance as the author and a listener?
NC: Well, when we first had him for The Troop, I didn't know much about, frankly, audiobooks in general. I'm trying to think if up until then I'd even had an audiobook. I think I must have. But I wasn't super aware of it. And audiobooks, as you know, have become massively popular. I'm a bit of a Luddite. I'm still paper book, not even a Kindle. I don't know why I've not been able to make the transition so well. But I have listened to some audiobooks, and a really good narrator who really seems to know the material or harmonize with the material, however you want to say it, is invaluable.
"There's nothing like being a writer, or probably a creative person in general, to discover your obsessions and your fixations, because you go back to them much like a honey bee to a pollinating bud."
So, in getting Corey, which was just a stroke of luck, and seeing how listeners reacted to his work, I think a lot of listeners would tell you that he accelerates the material, makes it even more interesting. So, you can only be grateful for someone who can actually take the material that you're giving them and elevate it, is maybe the word I'm looking for. Authors aren't generally very much involved with the voice cast. You just get lucky. And I really have been fortunate. But the only thing that I said is, “Everybody likes Corey. So, if we can get him, that'd be awesome.”
NR: As you've previously mentioned, Nick Cutter is one of the pseudonyms you use when you write. What made you decide to write under different pen names throughout your writing career?
NC: Well, I grew up being a horror reader in the ’80s. It was my first love, remains my first love, and I still read more horror and watch more horror than I do any other genre. Obviously, in the ’80s opened a gateway for me and millions of other readers. But when I started setting myself to a task of writing, I thought it'd be a good idea to go to a writing workshop, get my master’s, basically. I thought it would give me the time, and to be around like-minded individuals so that I would be able to parry off of them, an “iron sharpens iron” sort of an idea. But when it came to actually writing my thesis, if I decided I wanted to write a horror novel, it was not going to be accepted. I don't mean to speak ill of my fellow classmates or professors, but even if I said I liked horror, that was sometimes taken with a backwards glance. There was a little bit of elitism, like, “Why are you bothering to read that?" Let alone, “Don't think that you're going to sully the walls of our academic institution with your horror.”
That has changed not only at the institution I went to. Someone goes in there with a notion of writing a genre book, I think they're much more receptive to it, thank goodness. But at the time, that was not in the offing. So, I ended up writing a collection of short stories that I wouldn't say were literary, but let's say that. And they were fortunate enough to get picked up. Then that was my career for the opening seven, eight years of my life, career-wise.
But then I had this idea that was so clearly horror and there's no way it could've been jerry-rigged into anything but. And I didn't want to jerry-rig it into anything but. I went home from the source of that inspiration in a heated furor and I kicked that thing out in like four or five weeks before my brain could tell me that this is a bad idea. Sent it to my agent expecting the worst, but he was pleased with it. We sent it out, and that started this new genre of writing under the name Nick Cutter.
That was a decision that was made not because of my dislove of horror. I think that's the main thing that I always want to say about writing under a pen name, because there is this sense that if you're writing under a pen name, you are trying to obscure your own name and keep it clean, for lack of a better word. But I work just as hard at the Cutter books as I do on the books under my own name, and I'm frankly much better known as Nick Cutter than I am under my own name. I've had the unfortunate or odd occurrence of my pen name kind of George Stark-ing and coming out of nowhere and overtaking me as my own self. But I'm dead-pleased that that happened and I'm dead-pleased that I've been able to write as Nick Cutter. I put just as much effort and thought and care into those books as I do to the works under my own name.
NR: So, for your fans, what are you working on next?
NC: There's a book under my own name that I'm putting the finishing editorial touches on—well, the finishing draft touches on before I send it to my editor and see what she thinks of it. And then under the Cutter nom de plume, we've got two more books under contract. One of them is called The Dorians, which is about a group of elderly people who are given an opportunity to take a therapy that reverses chronological age. And being it's a Cutter book, it doesn't work out so stellarly. And there's another one called Gravenhurst, which takes place at a juvenile detention facility in the woods. So, me writing about young people again. Young people in peril. Those ideally should come out over the next couple years.
NR: Well, all of that sounds great, honestly, especially the one with the kids in the woods. I hate to say it, but that's such a great genre. Nick, thanks for taking the time to answer all of my burning questions. Listeners, you can get The Queen on Audible now.
