Nick Cutter looked at wasps and somehow decided they weren't horrifying enough already. The Queen is gross, disturbing, completely ridiculous at times, and exactly the kind of body horror I expect from him. I had a LOT of fun with this, even if there were a few things keeping it from being a full five stars for me.

Margaret's best friend Charity has been missing for over a month when a mysterious iPhone shows up on her doorstep with messages from Charity herself. What follows is basically a horrifying scavenger hunt through everything Margaret never knew about the person she thought she knew better than anyone.

I really loved that structure. Every new message reveals another piece of Charity's story, and the further Margaret follows her trail, the more bizarre everything becomes. There's this constant feeling that something absolutely horrible is waiting at the end, and considering this is Nick Cutter, you already know you're probably not going to enjoy finding out what it is.

And the body horror absolutely delivers. This book is NASTY. Insects already make incredibly effective horror material, but Cutter takes that concept and pushes it about twelve steps further than any reasonable person would. There were multiple moments where I physically recoiled from what I was reading, which is exactly what I came here for.

What surprised me more was how much of the book is actually about Margaret and Charity's friendship. Underneath all the gore and increasingly insane science is a story about realizing that someone you've loved your entire life had an entire existence you knew nothing about. That gave the horror an emotional element I wasn't expecting and made Charity much more than just the mystery Margaret needed to solve.

It did lose me a little in places. There is a lot happening here, and the explanations behind everything occasionally became more complicated than I needed them to be. I was much more invested in Margaret, Charity, and the disgusting nightmare unfolding around them than I was in understanding every detail of how that nightmare came to exist.

But when this book gets going, it really fucking gets going. The final stretch is brutal, disgusting, chaotic, and completely committed to the insanity of its premise.