  The merging of two black holes is a notoriously difficult process to describe
exactly. Nevertheless, the hindrances posed by gravity's nonlinearity can be
circumvented by focusing on the strict extreme mass ratio limit, in which one
of the black holes is infinitely larger than the other. Such an approach has
been developed by Emparan and Mart\'inez and applied within General Relativity
to investigate the time evolution of event horizons melding, using nothing but
elementary concepts in gravitational physics and simple integrations of
geodesics. We apply this strategy to study black hole mergers in higher
derivative gravity, in order to assess how the defining characteristics of the
fusion process change as the gravitational theory is modified. We adopt the
case of Einsteinian cubic gravity for concreteness, and determine how the
mergers' duration and the relative area increment change as the theory's single
coupling parameter is varied.
