The Queen by Nick Cutter

I would like to thank Arcadia for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Arcadia

Published - Out Now

Price - £20 hardback £11.99 Kindle eBook

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 . . .

I am a firm believer that horror is great for handling difficult subjects. I think one reason many of us find it as teenagers is that it can show us the crueller and darker side of the world we inhabit and say it’s ok to find this wrong. While Pennywise is a scary clown indeed for me it’s Derry’s casual bland evil that haunts me. Many horror tales have younger characters having to see what’s under the mask of our world. The key as with all storytelling is how the world and characters are coming alive and feel real to us. In Nick Cutter’s The Queen - destroyed friendships and killer wasps are supposed to combine into a horror novel but sadly for me this was a huge disappointment.

It’s 2018 and Margaret Carpenter better known as Cherry is trapped in a ruined elite golf club wary of the flying wasps and watching the many deceased bodies in it erupt with creatures living in their flesh.

A day earlier Margaret found an iPhone on her doormat. Strange texts suggest this may be her missing friend Charity Atwater also known as Plum. She starts to investigate the phones clues and finds nothing so what she thought it was.

I have no issues with idea of young teenagers getting involved in a conspiracy thriller that will contain killer wasps and evil experiments by billionaires. That sounds a fun read. But what I need is decent writing and coherence and this book doesn’t deliver any of those.

To put it bluntly Cherry doesn’t sound in her first person narration as a teenage girl from 2018. The dialogue is off and while we later get the excuse that Cherry is great at creative writing the many older phrases and referenced to Robert Frost and The Sopranos feels to be an older character (or should I say author?). That’s a problem as she is the entry point to the story and perhaps Cutter realised that as we start getting other perspectives and also explanations of what is going on as the book continues. Ultimately I found her quite flat as a character and didn’t care about her fate.

Cutter does do body horror well and if this was a shorter story I could have allowed a pass but the bigger storytelling is quite incoherent with leap forwards and backwards in plot that feel less plotting and more random asides to tell us things when we need to know them. Dialogue is clunky, the setting is too dull and ultimately again nothing for me to get my teeth into enjoying.

I need at least decent storytelling and this story fails on multiple levels for me. The Queen is not recommended.