Synopsis
The all-new novel of terror from “one of the hottest horror authors on the planet” (Paste) and writer of the #HorrorBookTok sensation The Troop!
On a remote island in the Canadian wilderness, five elderly volunteers from different walks of life are given a tantalizing offer: to stall their biological clocks or even reverse them, restoring their lost youth. The chance to put death on pause—forever, perhaps. The remarkable secret lies in the high-tech harnessing of an ancient and extraordinary biological agent…one with no conscience, yet possessed with a single-minded purpose that has helped it persist for eons: the will to survive. The dark heart of unbridled human ambition finds its apex in an unholy experiment that now tests the limits of both creator and subject, eclipsing all bounds of morality and sanity….
Review
Stories about mankind’s search for eternal youth and beauty are almost as old as mankind itself, ranging from ancient tales about the Fountain of Youth to present-day cosmetics industries and their promises of wrinkle-vanishing creams and lotions that restore the skin’s lost elasticity. Nowadays, social media influencers peddling nonsensical promises under the guise of attention-grabbing headlines are a dime a dozen. Yet, the allure of such promises refuses to fade despite the mountains of scientific evidence – and worse – that runs contrary to such wish fulfillment.
On the horror fiction front, Nick Cutter’s latest, The Dorians, most certainly runs headlong toward the “and worse” part of the equation. In this book of science gone wrong mayhem, a group of elderly folks at death’s door – quite literally, given their preparations for medically assisted suicide – are offered a last-minute reprieve and a promise to cure what ails them. The offer, or perhaps more so the mystery surrounding this offer, is too tantalizing to ignore. They quickly find themselves secreted off to a remote island that’s home to a scientific compound spearheaded by 19-year-old Dr. Astrid Marsh, a super-genius who graduated from Princeton before reaching her teens. Now funded by corporate benefactors to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, she’s in the process of fine-tuning a procedure to reverse aging via a biological implant genetically engineered from coral, jellyfish, and fungal mold. Marsh has named this specimen the Hydra but, of course, the results are less Cocoon and more Jurassic Park.
Once the Hydra has been implanted in our handful of dying old folks, they soon find themselves feeling better and looking younger. But it wouldn’t be much of a horror story if everything turned out hunky-dory, would it? Oh no, no no no, that simply would not do. The trials and tribulations of Marsh’s astronomically high IQ comes with a cost. Not only is she socially inept, she’s also got severe anger management issues and is crazier than a sack full of rabid cats. And then there’s the test subjects themselves, particularly the tall, broad-bodied Hugo, who lost his daughter at a tender young age to an innocent mishap and who spent much of his own youth doing very bad things, and Claire, whose hunger for youth has turned her into a manipulative minx.
As the experiment progresses, the group can’t get younger fast enough for their liking and begin taking things into their own hands. Much of this initially involves doing a lot of talking, threatening, and cajoling that contrasts their rediscovered youthful appearances with slang from the 50s, so they sound like outdated greasers, minus the leather jackets and finger snapping, until they finally concoct plans to violently expedite their aging reversal. Eventually, Ian Malcolm’s infamous words from Jurassic Park come to haunt all involved as the Hydra exerts its own instinctual controls over their bodies because, you know, “life finds a way.”
Much like the Hydra, The Dorians itself is a mishmash of works that have come before, engineered into a cobbled-together end-product made from pieces of this and bits of that. Rather than trying to shy away from what’s come before, Cutter leans hard into the various influences that constitute The Dorians. You can see the stitchwork binding together Michael Crichton and Stephen King, The Island of Doctor Moreau, dashes of Carpenter and Cronenberg, a smidge of The Substance, Frankenstein, and plenty more. So much of The Dorians reads like an Easter egg hunt to spot all the ideas and constituent components that Cutter’s cribbing from earlier creatives who have done all the work for him. Little of the story is fresh or original, and there’s an almost meta-level commentary to this book’s existence, which lives much like the Hydra itself, as a parasite riding on the backs of others.
Which brings me to a central mystery of my own making – how to fairly judge The Dorians on its own terms when so much of it exists in relation to works that came before. In liberally taking so many constituent parts from so many other works, Cutter has managed to take much of what works from his forebears and dismiss a lot of what didn’t. While The Dorians is wholly unoriginal, with so much of its plot points virtually cut-and-pasted from a veritable goldmine of sci-fi horror genre definers that ran headlong into the fray so Cutter could stroll his way through decades later, it’s not without its own thoughts and complexities, shallow though they may be. It’s derivative, but so recognizably so one could argue it’s pastiche. It’s premise and execution are so overly familiar in too many crucial ways, but it’s never dull or unreadable. For the most part, I found myself enjoying the read, even as I recognized so many of its combinate parts from so many other previous sources. Could The Dorians exist in its current state without Jurassic Park or Frankenstein or Doctor Moreau before it? I doubt it; the whole book is the literary equivalent of memberberries, albeit in a blessedly less pernicious way than a Ready Player One or some such equivalent. Is a book that’s unoriginal but enjoyable better than a book that’s original but boring? Or is it just six of one, half-dozen of another? I don’t know. I guess at the end of the day, my thinking is that The Dorians is little more than junk food for the brain. It tastes good, but it’s not good for you, and you’ll probably forget all about it in a day or two anyway.
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