The Dorians
Nick Cutter
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 978-1668079560
Gallery Books, May 2026, 400 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month, it’s time to take your pills, rub some ointment on those aching bones, and try to ignore all those creeping chills as you descend deeper and deeper into the madness of the grave in The Dorians, by Nick Cutter.

(Upfront warning—this book has quite a bit of body horror in it, as well as descriptions of suicidal ideation, so if that’s not your particular cup of tea, you might want to take a pass.)

The Dorians is a psychological horror/thriller that follows five terminally ill elderly people, all of whom have chosen to die via medically assisted suicide, and their subsequent trip to a remote island in the Canadian wilderness after being told of an experimental procedure that could not just revitalize their aging bodies back into the flower of youth, but might in fact cheat death forever. Once there, they meet the young scientific genius behind the treatment, Dr. Astrid Marsh, and her three assistants (one a bioethicist, the other two general maintenance and labor), as well as a mystery woman with whom Astrid is unreasonably close (one might say possessively so).

Naturally, experimental scientific treatments being performed in isolated laboratories by an unhinged researcher with barely anyone around means that absolutely nothing goes wrong, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Haha. HaHAha. HAHAHAHAHAHAAaaaaa oh yeah, no, that’s not at all what happens, but you’ll have to read the book to see just how horrible everything gets, and let me tell you, it gets pretty disturbing.

Longtime fans of the genre will instantly recognize the bones of The Dorians story (it’s a heady mix of Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, with hints of The Thing and *gestures at Stephen King’s bibliography*. Still, Cutter does an excellent job of swirling up these different flavors into a taste decidedly his own. The initial pacing of the book is deliberate and methodical, unfolding the cast of characters in a mix of third-person descriptions and first-person thoughts. It’s a difficult method that can easily lead to motives feeling shallow and underdeveloped, but Cutter masterfully establishes seventy to eighty years of life in a series of snapshot vignettes for each character that allow them to occupy the space needed without drowning the reader in endless backstory. In addition, Cutter also peppers in various deliberate narrative not-quite-fourth-wall-breaking asides that help build a slowly growing sense of ominous disaster that lurks just around the next page.

Then, you flip the next page, and now the disaster is there, and it’s coming for you.

Once the action gets going and characters start facing consequences for Knowing Things Wot Are Not Meant To Be Known Of, Cutter cleverly executes a shift in focus from “what will go wrong” to “will anyone survive and how,” while also subverting some standard horror tropes in interesting ways. Cutter also does a masterful job of letting the latter part of the story breathe, in that it isn’t a breakneck pace to the finish line once everything goes wrong, but rather a slowly building crescendo that ebbs and flows while constantly ratcheting the tension higher and higher, and the ending was fantastic in how it wrapped things up while still leaving a frisson of fear lingering in the narrative air.

Overall, if you’re looking for an escape from the horrors of everyday life into the horrors of classic human hubris, you can’t go wrong with The Dorians. Living forever is something best reserved for the minds of madmen and monsters.