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REVIEW: The Queen by Nick Cutter

November 20, 2024 by Seanchalant Leave a Comment

Rating: 8/10

SYNOPSIS

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…

REVIEW

Thank you Gallery Books for sending me a copy of The Queen to read and review. All opinions are honest and my own.

Growing up is hard. Friends drift apart, your body changes, you get new urges that can be exciting and equally terrifying. For Margaret and Charity it’s about to get a helluva lot harder.

Dealing with themes of classism, puberty, friendship, and growing up, The Queen is a break-neck paced body horror taking place over the course of one wild day. Cronenbergian body horror meets Stephen King high school horror with a dash of 13 Reasons Why,

Charity has been missing for a while and Margaret has cut herself off from the world. Until she wakes up to an iPhone delivered to her house and starts receiving mysterious messages from Charity. This leads to a wild goose chase to find out what happened to her best friend and the revelations are truly buzzworthy.

The character work in this novel is fantastic, portraying a fraying friendship in one of the most extreme circumstances possible. People grow and change, some because of money or college, some in more bizarre ways, but the message is the same. You never truly know anyone, sometimes you’re lucky to even fully know yourself. As a thirty-one year old with a practically non-existent friend group, this really resonated with me. People I was inseparable from I haven’t talked to in a decade or more. Some of them went down paths I never thought would be possible for them, both good and bad. Although, none of them went through what Charity went through, so I guess we’re lucky there.

But now on to the fun stuff. This book is full of ants, bees and creepy crawlies galore. I don’t want to spoil too much, but as the description and cover implies, this is a body horror novel involving wasps. Nick Cutter describes the transformations in gloriously excruciating detail that is sure to get under your skin, not unlike some unfortunate souls in this novel. I will never look at a wasp the same and I hope beyond hope that I NEVER encounter a siafu ant.

Nick Cutter lives up to his namesake with this novel. He cuts through your skin with stingers and teeth, leaving you feeling raw. He cuts through your fears and shows you what’s creeping and crawling underneath. And he cuts into your heart as you watch a friendship fall apart while showing you how good it used to be. Nick Cutter is one of my favorite horror authors right now, and this book is a perfect example of why.

Filed Under: Body Horror, Coming of age, Creature Feature, Fear For All, Medical Horror, Monsters, Reviews Tagged With: Bees, Book Review, Bugs, Gallery Books, Horror, Nick Cutter, Simon & Schuster, The Queen, The Troop

About Seanchalant

Sean Conley (not Connery) aka Seanchalant is an proud father of three little nerds, AnaMaurin Victoria, Landyn Lawrence, and Raylan Aviendha Mae. He is a stay at home dad while his hardworking and wonderful fiancée,
Gabriella Oropeza brings home the 🥓 and he always has a book on his person. On the autism spectrum, he has a tendency to become an encyclopedia on things he enjoys. Raised on horror films (The Evil Dead series is #1) and Stephen King, his love of fantasy was born from Army of Darkness and Tad Williams; cultivated by John Gwynne and Mark Lawrence. He enjoys everything from epic fantasy to urban fantasy, grimdark to high fantasy. His favorite bands are blink-182, The Beatles, and Wu-Tang Clan.

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