Sometime before the dawn of the Obama era, Craig Davidson found himself in Iowa City, Iowa, ordering steroids from the dark web. Hot off the publication of his debut short story collection, Rust and Bone, Davidson was working on a novel called The Fighter, about an aspiring underground boxer, while attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His editor told him the book wasn’t working, so Davidson tried to ratchet up narrative tension by making his protagonist take steroids.

“And my next natural thought, because I was in my late 20s and single and an idiot,” Davidson says on a video call from his home in suburban Ontario, “was, well, why don’t I do steroids?”

He did just that—reporting, somewhat obliquely, that they “had a lot of the effects you would expect steroids would have”—
and then wrote a nonfiction account of his experience, which he sold to a magazine for a little cash. The experiment did little to improve The Fighter, but it did prompt him to write articles about hormone replacement therapy and, eventually, novels of Cronenbergian body horror, penned under the pseudonym Nick Cutter.

Almost 20 years later, Davidson is preparing to publish The Dorians, his ninth outing as Cutter, due in May from Gallery. Themes of biological optimization feature heavily. The Dorians follows five sick, elderly Canadians who are scheduled to die by assisted suicide, until 19-year-old scientific prodigy Astrid Marsh invites them to participate in a mysterious life-extending experiment on an island off the coast of Ontario.

Much of Davidson’s fiction is set in Ontario, the Canadian province where he was born and where he’s settled after a childhood as a “bank brat” who moved often for his banker father’s work. It was in Ontario that encouragement from an English teacher—“I can’t believe I’m saying this, Craig, but you actually seem to show some facility at this, although you’ve shown no facility at anything else regarding any aspect of human life,” as Davidson recalls—motivated him to keep writing stories. It was in Ontario that Davidson studied the classics at Trent University, and it was there he returned after a master’s down east at the University of New Brunswick and his time in Iowa.

For The Dorians, Ontario’s appeal was simple: the province butts against the Hudson Bay, which is full of remote islands where Astrid could plausibly conduct her experiment in secret, Jurassic Park style. Her aim is to extend life by injecting her elderly subjects with an implant derived from the hydra, a jellyfish-like creature, which should, in theory, make them age backward until their health stabilizes, thus preventing their deaths from natural causes. It should also cure them of the unbearable ailments that nearly drove them to suicide. That turning back the clock might offer them second shots at sexual and emotional fulfillment is just an added bonus. Spoiler alert: little goes as planned.

If visions of Algernon or Victor Frankenstein are coming to mind, that’s by design. Though most of Davidson’s Cutter novels have what he calls “a sort of Promethean outlook,” The Dorians carries an emotional weight and pronounced ethical dimension that has largely eluded his other spine-tinglers. “When I wrote my first couple books in my late 20s and early 30s, everyone I knew was in good health,” he says. “When I started writing this one, we were just coming out of the pandemic, and my father was battling cancer.” The 50-year-old novelist speaks mostly while leaning on his kitchen counter, biceps bulging against a black T-shirt; small, circular glasses frame his face. “The idea of wanting to prolong one’s life, to avoid the decline endemic to all of us—part of aging just pulls you into those orbits.”

Davidson says he was also fascinated by the tension between the human desire for autonomy and our tendency to ply ourselves with life-improving technologies that often have their own agendas. “By the time we reach a certain age, we have all sorts of stuff inside us—pills, pacemakers, stents—that are not natural to our bodies but are there to extend our lives or make them better in some way,” he reflects. “There’s a Faustian bargain that you make with some of them, or a sense that you might not know what the downstream effects are going to be, but you consent in order to get what you want right now.”

Usually, the discrepancies between what we want and what our medical implants want are minimal. But, The Dorians asks, what if that gap started to widen?

Such questions are part of what Davidson loves about writing horror. Not that he ever expected he’d be doing so when he was in grad school. But when The Fighter came out in 2006, it tanked, and Davidson’s once-promising literary career stalled. (A stint in the boxing
ring to promote The Fighter didn’t bear much professional fruit: Davidson was pummeled by a poet in Toronto, then by Jonathan Ames in Brooklyn at a match attended by Fiona Apple.) To stay afloat, he started driving buses and working at the library. He then published a pair of novels under his own name and some little-read splatter fiction under the pseudonym Patrick Lestewka, but he made uneasy peace with the idea that he might never find mainstream success again.

Then a 2012 trip to Toronto’s natural history museum gave him a fully formed idea for a new book: a gruesome tale about Boy Scouts who stumble across a government experiment gone wrong. It was more in line with the Stephen King and Clive Barker paperbacks Davidson read as a teenager than the Raymond Carver stories he’d once tried to emulate. He poured out a manuscript “on
pure adrenaline,” he says, which became 2014’s The Troop.

Davidson’s publisher loved The Troop but feared audiences might not accept such a goopy gore-fest from a writer whose first book had just been adapted into an arty French film starring Marion Cotillard. Davidson agreed to publish the new book under a nom de plume, picking Nick because it was the name of his newborn son (now 13), and Cutter for its grind house appeal. Though he offered little pushback against the arrangement, Davidson never meant to keep it under wraps.

“Horror was my first love,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to be seen as some sort of day tripper or somebody embarrassed by the genre who wanted to sweep these books under the rug. I try to bring the same level of whatever craft I have to anything I do.”

Nine books in, though, Davidson’s work as Cutter has eclipsed anything he’s published as himself. The Troop is a perennial favorite on BookTok, and most of the Cutter novels, including 2015’s The Deep and 2024’s The Queen, are in some stage of development for film or TV adaptation. For the most part, Davidson is fine with this.

“I’ve had a remarkable opportunity to get back on the horse after it bucked me off,” he says. “If that means that Craig Davidson is now my secondary career, well, that’s the way life goes sometimes. I don’t begrudge any of it. It’s hard enough to make a living by your pen in whichever way you’re doing it.”

Now that Davidson has entered his 50s, he’s started thinking about what life might look like after he puts the pen down. He has a few more books in the pipeline, but he’s sensitive to overstaying his welcome. “New voices need to come along,” he says. “When the
market has decided that my time is up, I’m finally at peace with saying, I did the thing that I wanted to do when I was in grade 11
and a completely unremarkable student. When it’s time to take that final bow, I don’t think I’m going to have too much difficulty.”

Spoken, some would say, like a person who’s just written a book about the grisly disadvantages of trying to live forever.