Aging caught up with Nick Cutter.
Like most horror authors, the writer behind The Troop, The Deep, and other modern classics of the genre is aware of his own mortality, and it makes its way into his work. But it wasn’t until his late 40s that, according to Cutter, a book like his new novel The Dorians started to feel like the right way to tackle aging, and the fight against it, head-on.
“When I go play basketball, I used to, coming home, I’d say, ‘I’m feeling a little achy, I might take an Aleve,'” Cutter, whose real name is Craig Davidson, told me from his home in Canada. “Now, I take one before I go play so that it kicks in by the time I get on the court. I think there’s just something specific to that type of narrative that, at this point, has really found enough momentum on a personal level that I felt like just sitting down and writing something to do with reversing aging.”
The result is The Dorians, a sci-fi horror exploration of the lives of five elderly test subjects, all preparing to face death, who are pulled into a mysterious medical trial that could stop or even reverse the aging process. Each of them is dealing with a different ailment, a different version of death hanging over them, and all of them feel like they have nothing to lose. But by the time teenage scientist Astrid is done with them, they might be rethinking that.
According to Cutter, the book was inspired by a number of concepts swirling around in his brain, beginning with the idea that certain species of jellyfish can achieve biological immortality, giving him the inspiration for the creature that powers Astrid’s experiments. Then, there was the legal reality of Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) laws, which allow people to end their lives on their terms with the aid of trained professionals. And finally, Cutter found the notion of centering his book on elderly characters appealing, particularly after writing books like The Troop and his last novel, The Queen, both of which follow young people.
“I really enjoyed that, actually,” Cutter said. “I’m the person that when I was in high school, I had jobs, and there’d always be a couple of retirees at the jobs I worked at who were doing it just to stay sharp or give themselves something to do. I would naturally gravitate towards them and listen to their often rather long and involved stories, which I’m sure one day I’ll tell the same. I think as we get older, our storytelling abilities develop, but they also get languorous. Yes, I enjoyed coming up with those characters, but they came to the fore, as they usually do in my work, as a process of moving through the narrative paces. They change, obviously, in this book, most of them depending on the petri dish that I’ve built for them and the way that they can be most interesting within it.“
The particular petri dish, metaphorically speaking, surrounding each of the test subjects in The Dorians is better left in spoilery territory for now, but one of the more fascinating choices Cutter makes in the book is flipping the script on the relationship between his test subjects and his scientist. This time around, the person running the strange experiments that make everything go haywire is a young girl, brimming with intelligence and drive but not always equipped with the social skills necessary to handle her elderly patients.
Though The Dorians spends most of its time in the heads of older people going through profound changes, Astrid’s place as mad scientist gives it an undeniable extra source of tension. According to Cutter, putting a young person in control of the whole narrative was inspired by the classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” which starred a young Bill Mumy as a little boy with incredible powers who holds an entire town of adults under his control.
“It’s like the student shouldn’t tell the teacher what to do. To invert that seems to destabilize the whole fabric of decorum and law and everything that we accept as humans,” Cutter said. “We do see, in some cases, that power is installed in the hands of people who don’t know what to do with it, who misuse it, who misrepresent it. I feel a little for Astrid. Astrid is the little prince whose vast intellect has separated her from the rest of humanity and made it almost impossible for her to really see other human beings as human beings.”
Broadly speaking, The Dorians falls into the category of Wellness Horror, a subgenre which only seems to be picking up more steam in an age when dramatic weight loss can arrive in the form of a pill and tech billionaires spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to look and feel as young as possible. But even with the prevalence of the phenomenon in mind, Cutter yet again swerves on some of its more predictable narrative hallmarks by revealing, almost immediately, what’s driving these experiments. Inspired by biologically immortal jellyfish, “The Hydra” is the seemingly eternal creature that powers Astrid’s work, and in order to accept its benefits, each test subject must have part of it implanted in their bodies. It’s a reveal that other novels might take hundreds of pages to lay out, but for Cutter, it needed to happen right up front.
“It felt like it would be interesting to unpack it, show readers how it might be conceivable, and you push towards an inner logic that may be taking over in the book,” Cutter explained, “I think that’s partially because a lot of my books, they do have a small or larger scientific aspect to them. That’s just based on, I think I enjoy researching that sort of stuff and finding that sort of stuff out. It could have worked fine without all the extra scientific detail, and maybe even in some points in these books, I go a little too far. I find it fun. [Michael] Crichton is a big influence in this book. He does such a masterful job of telling a story and introducing really interesting science, sometimes very complex science, but finding a really interesting way to breezily move through it and then out the other side without really sacrificing too much momentum.“
The Dorians is also, in its own strange way, kind of a sibling novel to Cutter’s most famous book, The Troop. Both follow a group of people journeying to a remote island, both follow a scientific discovery gone wrong, and both focus not just on the territory of sudden and inexplicable changes to the body, but also on being stuck somewhere with no chance for salvation or explanation.
“Isolation is the most valuable commodity in most horror because if it’s seen by a bunch of people, then it can’t be allowed to germinate in the most interesting ways, or it’ll get cut off and it’ll get stopped, some sort of logic or sanity will prevail,” Cutter said. “The more that you isolate characters, the more you allow increasingly insane things that can happen out of sight, but also you allow the characters to develop and take on layers, often perverse ones, once you strip away the general decorum and governance that prevails where you are and where I am.”
Just like The Troop, once Cutter has stripped his characters of closeness to civilization and exposed them to constantly evolving horrors, The Dorians becomes a battle not just for bodies, but for souls.
“I think that’s what’s interesting about a lot of horror stories, is that there are two paths that you can take. At some point, in this case, the thing inside of you starts to make you make choices whether you want to or not. Characters change. Nice characters become not-so-nice characters, and it’s hard to hold onto your humanity, which is generally the sweet spot for me.”
The Dorians is available May 19 wherever books are sold.
