How a Love of Stephen King and MacGyver Turned Craig Davidson Into a Horror Star

Every friend group has a scary story to tell. That’s the basic premise behind The Saturday Night Ghost Club.

Inspired by Stephen King’s Stand by Me, Davidson’s early foray into horror centers on a group of misfit kids in the 1980s who spend a formative summer investigating local occult legends and ghost stories.

Davidson notes the protagonist Jake Baker is “kind of a stand-in for me in a lot of ways.”

“I was a rather rotund young boy, and we traveled around a lot because my dad was a banker, and so we ended up being in and out of different towns quite a bit,” Davidson said. “And there was always that point where I was sort of struggling to make friends and spent a lot of time at the library.”

Davidson’s wonderful character Uncle Calvin is also an exaggerated amalgamation of his uncles growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. The Calvin character is filled to the brim with weird tales of screaming tunnels, conspiracy theories, and neighborhood ghosts for Jake.

Davidson notes it was a lot easier to tap into his youth back then, but now he finds it harder to pull up memories: “Those memories are not as fresh and clean as the day you experienced them now.”

The more literary short stories collection Cascade follows in the tradition of his 2005 collection Rust & Bone under the same pen name.

Cascade’s seven tales are set in the Niagara Falls of Davidson’s imagination―known as "Cataract City"―and follow Davidson’s ruminations at the time on becoming a husband and father, and his dreams and hopes and some of the fears that bubble up from that. 

“The [Cascade] stories were written in my mid-thirties into my early to late mid-forties and are a different time in life than some of the things I drew from before.”

Davidson hopes that when he’s 60 he’ll look back at his current decade and have new fears and hopes: “It’s an interesting way to chronicle your own life in a weird way and the things that matter to you at those different epochs of your life.

The Troop will worm under your skin and lay eggs. More than any other Nick Cutter body horror novel, this one stands tallest in his body of work, and Davidson is perfectly OK with this.

“You're never given your chance to know what books you're going to be most remembered for, if it ends up being the truth,” admits Davidson.

The book is about the Troop 52 Boy Scouts being attacked in the Canadian wilderness by a very aggressive tapeworm. Davidson remembers writing the book in a sort of “white-hot” blast of inspiration. “I guess I needed to get this out and really wanted to say certain things. 

He thinks the story has resonated for so many readers because it’s a crucible where pre-teens “are forced to adopt adult ways of behavior because the adult is gone and no adults are coming to rescue them.”

Davidson notes the scariest part of growing up is realizing the adults don’t have it all figured out either.

“It's all the same," he notes. “There's a lot of protection or hiding of things from kids, and that's touched on in the book, but when you become an adult, there's new problems, but some of the universal problems just remain. You're just in an older body.”

Craig Davidson has long been claustrophobic so a novel set in a deep sea research lab was inevitable. “The deep water holds a fascination, and fear, so that part was no problem when writing the book,” Davidson remembers.

The hallucinatory book is set during a strange global plague that has no cure called the “Gets. People forget their keys or how to read and then eventually their bodies forget how to function properly overall.

The “Gets has brought humanity to its knees by making everyone forget. A group of scientists is trying to extract an unknown substance hailed as “ambrosia” deep under the sea in the hopes it will heal those affected by the plague.

Davidson coincidentally remembers very little from his time writing the book since he was on deadline and recently welcomed his first child. 

“I was trying to write during the day and I found myself sort of forgetting things and slipping away,” Davidson says. “The whole book is very clearly influenced by the actual point in my life when I was writing it.”

Both The Acolyte and Little Heaven overturn organized religions to see the squirming underbelly underneath and examine the personal and collective terror that is possible from religion.

Little Heaven in particular follows a trio of motley crew of mercenaries hired by a woman to check on her nephew, who may have been transported against his will to a remote New Mexico backwoods cult called Little Heaven.

Davidson admits he had a “bug in his bonnet” on this particular topic back then. “It buzzes sort of quietly nowadays,” he jokes.

He started writing Little Heaven way back during the Bush presidency and he remembered hearing former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in an interview stating that “he prayed at church for God to give him directives to engineer the war effort.”

Davidson was taken aback by Rumsfeld’s statement at the time and that anger seeped into his cult book influenced by crime writers Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. 

One of Davidson’s rare collaborative books The Handyman Method is a haunted house story with a domestic DIY project twist and the writer would jump at the chance to work with Andrew F. Sullivan again.

“Oh sure! Not sure what they would be, if they're novelistic in scope or shorter, but I'd work with Sully again any old time,” Davidson says.

Beyond the haunted house trope, The Handyman Method was influenced by Davidson growing up watching a lot of MacGuyver. This novel and The Queen have some moments that pay homage to the classic TV series from the ‘80s and ‘90s. 

“Well, that's a certain age group,” Davidson recalls. “I know they tried to reboot MacGyver at some point. I didn't see any of the new ones, but the old MacGyver, I loved Richard D. Anderson and all the cleverness that he had. It was quite a wonderful show, actually.” 

Davidson’s collaborative process evolved as it went along chapter by chapter for The Handyman Method he remembers. A lot of it was based on their lives as homeowners and “inabilities and frustrations regarding home repair.”

Davidson recalls it over email later: “We'd both felt kind of weird in de facto masculine spaces like Home Depot, though we'd muddle through. Like a lot of men, our skills lean towards the cerebral rather than the practical so in the same way some men may feel uncomfortable in, say, a university classroom, I feel less at home on a building site where I'd probably put my hardhat on backwards and fall into a vat of cement.”

Davidson’s most recent Nick Cutter novel returns to his fascination with the skittering and buzzing insect world. He takes cues from certain scenes in The Fly, The Thing, and Carrie for the unsettling and gore-filled parts, but he keeps going back to his memories of his hometown. 

Cutter’s seventh novel focuses on best friends Margaret and Charity and the dark secrets that come up after Charity goes missing but then returns after everyone assumes she’s dead. Davidson returns to the growing-up themes that run constantly through all his books.

The Queen in particular vibrates the strands of fear he had when he left for university at 19 and some of his friends stayed home and drifted apart.

“These were people that I thought I was going to be friends with for my entire life,” Davidson remembers.

“Discovering that kind of mixture of guilt, weird recrimination, and longing between two people, two characters in this book; that was the spine of it really for me. And that's what I followed through all the gore and all the sort of horror pyrotechnics. But what was most important to me, I think, was to follow that relationship at that specific time in a person's life.”

The Audible Original The Breach is a hard-boiled listen for conspiracy theory fans. Chief of Police John Hawkins is counting down the days to retirement at the Lone Crow Reservation in the wintery woods of the Yukon.

A faceless body with unexplainable wounds washes up on the shores of the Porcupine River at the start of the story.

The dead body turns out to be theoretical physicist Graham Raphelson, also known as the “molecular madman of Trinity College,” who recently disappeared.

The two lead characters decide they need to fire up Raphelson’s infernal machine and rip a hole through space and time. 

Davidson recalls The Breach was influenced by the classic Algernon Blackwood novella “The Willows.” “I remember reading that influenced one of my favorite movies From Beyond, which was originally an H.P. Lovecraft story.” 

Beyond Blackwood and Lovecraft, Davidson has always been fascinated with science experiments and conspiracy theories, so his deep dives into the Manhattan Project and Project Paperclip also got tossed into the mix for The Breach.