Nick Cutter has a reputation for crafting chilling horror stories which is what we expected heading into his latest novel, The Queen. While we got the gory horror that we wanted, the book fell a bit short of our expectations feeling a bit more science fiction than horror in the end.
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.
Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…except for the destructive secret hidden from them both. A secret that will trigger a chain of events ending in tragedy, bloodshed, and death. 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 disquieting breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend—a person she never truly knew at all…
Nick Cutter has a great ability to craft wonderful novels that is for sure. While some may find The Queen right up there alley, I did enjoy Cutters stunning ability to write gory scenes, but I just didn’t get the same feelings as I have in previous Cutter works (read The Troop). This latest novel was not exactly what I was expecting. These things sometimes can fall on the reader as we set up our own preconceived notions of what the book should be before even reading it. The Queen was definitely an interesting enough read, but had a very different vibe than I was expecting.
As I said already, Cutter can craft a gory novel and The Queen is that type of body horror. The writing screams that Cutter is a fan of classic horror films such as Frankenstein or even David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Nick gives us a tale filled with intensely graphic scenes that will make even the most seasoned readers skin crawl. However, writing a story that balances between science fiction and horror can sometimes bleed into one or the other and the fact this one leaned more into the sci-fi realm was one place that lost us. Yes, I understand that can be hard to understand for some, but that is how we felt when closing the book.
Lastly, the pacing was a bit off for me. Cutter has had some stellar novels published with no issues in pacing, but I felt The Queen was strange in the pacing department. Additionally, I had a hard time getting into the style of writing Cutter used in this novel. Those two things added to my struggles with the type of book didn’t outweigh the quality of the story, but had some effect on my overall liking of the novel.
Nick Cutter has crafted a horror sci-fi novel that may not have met my expectations, but is definitely the wheelhouse for a lot of readers. The Queen is not what I expected when I open the first pages, but in the end we get a plot that is worth the journey if you can see past some other elements such as pacing and writing style that had me hung up. In the end, the book is definitely not a complete miss, The Queen will likely be held up against Nick’s other offerings and with good merit.
The Queen hits bookstores everywhere on October 29, 2024 from Gallery Books. The audiobook, narrated by Ariel Blake, Zac Aleman, Corey Brill & Pete Simonelli, can be pre-ordered at Libro.fm!
