Teen Life Is a Horror Show

Molly D. Boyd considers Nick Cutter’s new horror novel “The Queen.”

By Molly D. BoydNovember 20, 2024

• Fiction

• SF

• Gender & Sexuality

IMAGINE HOW YOU would define horror if you were a teenage girl. Would your horrors include being constantly tracked by video and cell phone? Betraying a friend or being betrayed in return? Being filmed by classmates and vilified for your most vulnerable moment? Being the victim of bodily changes that rush toward a genetically predetermined outcome regardless of your own volition? How about being caught in the apocalyptic aftermath of an untethered billionaire’s “blackly amoral” scientific experiment? If you didn’t think of those last two, Nick Cutter did. That disturbing scenario drives the plot of The Queen (2024), the seventh novel written by Craig Davidson under the pen name Nick Cutter. In The Queen, Cutter metaphorically spins grotesque, bodily-fluid-splattering exaggerations out of the revolving trauma of teenage life.

Beneath the gore galore lie the normal stresses of life as a teenager; Cutter’s prose reminds readers that young adults matter-of-factly view everyday life through horror-colored lenses: they see “dishes stuck with scabs of spaghetti sauce,” a “sweatshirt stained with crime-scene spatters of Mountain Dew Code Red,” or a phone that rings with a “burst of tinkly, Apple-y music like Steve Jobs whistling from the afterlife.” Teenagers, whom one of Cutter’s characters dubs “phylum Terrorus teenagerum,” live precarious lives of self-centered hyperbole, alienation, and relentless change, even on their best days. Cutter’s characters embody universal teenage anxieties, painfully exaggerated and gore-splattered for extra emphasis.

The unhinged billionaire in the novel who sets the bloodbath in motion, Rudyard Crate, financier extraordinaire of insect-human hybrid experiments, thinks to himself, “Each subject in Project Athena was a Pandora’s box of tetchy chromosomes” that was “hardwired into the package from conception” and “the likelihood of that box springing open was astronomically higher during times of dynamic bodily or neurological change. Like basically, the entirety of human teenage-hood.” Thus, Crate’s genetic experiments are metaphorically parallel to the nearly universal changes experienced during one’s teen years.

The main plot takes place almost entirely during a single day, as protagonist Margaret Carpenter, called Cherry by her best friend Charity Atwater, is directed by mysterious texts on a final tour of the highlight-reel locations of her best friend Charity’s life. Charity, who Margaret says “was helixed to [her] memories so tightly it was as if [they] shared a common heart,” has been missing for more than a month, and when Margaret inadvisably embarks on this dubious quest, her initial goal is to find out what happened to Charity. But as each waypoint gets progressively more dangerous and gruesome, Margaret thinks, “I wished that she’d stayed gone. I didn’t want her to be hurt or tortured, to feel any pain at all. More that she’d just evaporate painlessly and stay away for good this time.”

These thoughts, the frank desire to abandon a friend rather than help her through a painful experience and the inability to own up to her own failings as a friend, among other violent interactions between the high school students in the novel, reveal why the late teen years are a perfect backdrop for a horror story. It is undeniably hard to be a teen. Many teenagers feel everything at the extreme—extreme highs or extreme lows, sometimes in the course of a single hour.

As she follows the clues left by Charity, Margaret listens to a taped voice recording in which Charity says, “[B]ut what if it wasn’t a monster looking to be let in? What if it was just, I don’t know, change?” Later, Charity says, “We’re changing […] All of us, so fast it’s hard to think straight.” The teenagers in this novel are certainly facing changes aplenty and often failing to deal with them appropriately. Take Margaret’s friend Harry, who accompanies her throughout the day and embodies a suicidal disregard for his own safety and well-being. Margaret is afraid of and afraid for the self-destructive aspect of Harry’s personality, which she calls Bad Harry, who always seemed to crave a “bizarre, incomprehensible ending,” and notes, “No matter how bad things got, no matter how dangerous or dead-end, Bad Harry would wade on in.” Harry is alienated from the adult world, whom he says wants kids to “be something we can’t be, some perfect kind of, of character. The thoughtful little boy you see in movies written by adults, who should know better.”

Alienation seems to be the name of the game with these teens. When her name is first called by Rudyard Crate, Margaret thinks, “The shape of my name in this stranger’s mouth felt a bit like going downstairs in the middle of the night, your brain still half-asleep, and missing a step in the dark: that horrible weightless lurch that was as if the bottom had dropped out of the world.” After Crate says “Leave it to teenagers to keep their world a secret from the adults, hmm? The most clamlike band on earth, you lot,” Margaret responds simply, “You’re the enemy.” She clarifies that she does not “mea[n] Rudy specifically, but adults. No adult could be fully trusted, even the ones we kind of liked.” Margaret’s parents are absent for the entirety of the novel, except for transcripts of the four increasingly pleading voicemail messages her father sent during the day, which she never answered, and which become a public record of failed communication. Other teens voice scorn for the pecuniary interest adults take in teens:

“Advertising execs are all, like: What do teens like? Is it memes? Memes about goblins? Dolphins? Is it pisslords? We need to sell more yogurt here!”

“—buncha fake-ass biiiii-ya-tches!—”

Another aspect of teen life depicted well in the novel is the paradox of both craving fame and fearing infamy. The teenagers crave attention—Bad Harry films stunt videos and posts them online—but fear undue attention. When Charity is seen by everyone at a drinking party after she had sex for the first time and was of course filmed, because high school, Margaret notes that it was as if “the onlookers were watching someone douse themselves in kerosene and tease a lit match down the hem of their blouse […] Symbolically setting fire to herself with this unforgivable act of exhibitionism.”

But the painful spectacle does not end with the films posted on social media. First, a rumor alters fact: Charity did not have sex with those upper-class boys. Instead, she was trying to extort money from them. This rumor, Margaret notes, was “perfect in its simplicity” because “[i]t leveraged how high school had always worked […] against a threat to its unbending hierarchy.” Then came “the mash-ups and remixes and GIFs. Those were easier to laugh at.” This kind of notoriety is devastating, and Margaret notes that “known isn’t beloved, it isn’t respected, it isn’t admired. It can be the most dehumanizing thing of all, becoming known.” Understandably, Charity drops out of high school following this incident and its aftermath.

This explosion of peer criticism focuses on the most primal change of all: Charity’s blossoming sexuality. In the novel, this is translated as a human-insect hybrid phenomenon, propelled by “pheromones capable of modifying her brood on a physiological and behavioral level.” One of the many scientists of questionable ethics in the novel describes this process: “‘When the queen reaches the stage of sexual maturity, she becomes’—Jameson swallowed with effort—‘quite industrious in her mating.’” But Charity’s ripening sexuality could just as easily be attributed to the normal process during which young adults become sexually aware, begin to attract potential mates, and ensure the continuation of our species. Cutter, himself the father of a teenage girl (as he notes in his afterword), grotesquely exaggerates Charity’s desire to have sex as both monstrous and cannibalistic to the mates she chooses, which can be disturbing. After Charity’s physical transformation, Margaret sees “that everything below her navel was not physically human. Her sex parts were now out. Outside of her body,” which both adds a grotesque cast to female reproductive organs and coyly alludes to male reproductive organs.

Despite Crate being the big bad billionaire who sets the plot in motion, the horrors in this novel aren’t committed by him or by some mask-wearing, chain saw–wielding outsider; they are perpetrated by the teens themselves, on each other, with the surrounding adults as collateral damage. Margaret concludes that Charity has forced-marched her through this final horror show of revenge both to punish her for being “a Bad Friend,” one who wanted to leave Charity behind and go to college, and because “she wanted [her] to bear witness,” because Margaret was the only person who had known and loved her.

Charity tells Margaret that what they feel is “an ache for understanding and connection and something to quench this crazy want […] To be loved and to love back as hard as you possibly can. But mostly it’s this desire to be seen. For who and what we are, simple as that.” Behind all the bad decisions and acting out, betrayals and disembowelments, Charity’s driving force at root is the desire to be loved and understood despite being known. As Cutter notes in the afterword:

The love they shared was particular to that time in our own brief existences, the years bridging childhood to adulthood that we call adolescence; that love is feral, it’s intoxicating, it’s wildly contradictory, it’s unstable, and it exists at levels that we can’t comprehend or even properly remember once we’ve gotten older.

Life as a teenager is hard. If we are very lucky, we get to put The Queen’s horror-show setting in the past. Feel free to pat yourself on the back if you survived high school. It’s still brutal.