Nick Cutter has built a ravenous fan base thanks to his knack for portraying the visceral elements of horror. From his breakout novel, The Troop, all the way through more recent releases like The Queen, to pick up a Cutter book means finding new ways to make your skin crawl. The Dorians is no exception. A descent into body horror, the novel is brimming with squirm-worthy moments and pure textural malevolence that feel like classic Cutter, but it also offers new ways for Cutter to explore deeper themes.
Cutter’s protagonists are a quintet of older, terminally ill people with plans to end their lives through euthanasia. One suffers from congestive heart failure, another from Lyme disease, still another from Parkinson’s, but they all share a desire to die on their terms. It makes them perfect candidates for a secret medical trial on a remote Canadian island. There, a medical prodigy has made an astonishing discovery: a sort of biological implant that grants its host dramatically prolonged life and can even reverse aging. All these dying souls need to do is trust this young doctor to save their lives.
Of course, with this arrangement comes a price, and as the first human subjects to try the treatment, these characters are venturing into uncharted territory—which is where Cutter’s gift for tension as tight as piano wire kicks into gear. The book moves at breakneck pace, and yet Cutter is in no hurry to cut through the dread with some of his patented gore. Cutter fans will certainly get their fill of that, but The Dorians offers more than horror. It’s also an ambitious character study of a group of people who feel their grip on the world fading, then find themselves forced to fight for lives they weren’t even sure they wanted anymore.
As an up-all-night horror story, The Dorians succeeds, as most Cutter stories do. But it also succeeds as something else: A warm character drama that is one of the author’s best works.