The Troop

The only thing worse than a good premise wasted on a bad book is having to read the book to figure that out. I couldn't even bring myself to do that however; I found myself routinely dragging my feet whenever I had a free moment to pick this one back up and after the infamous sea turtle scene I looked up the rest of the synopsis and skimmed some of the more important later chapters. I'm confident that had I given this book even more of my time than I already did, my overall impression would not have changed.

If nothing else this book validated my long-held belief that middle school-aged boys are absolute monsters that have no place in society. Still, I can't believe someone read Lord of the Flies and thought, "you know what? This isn't bleak enough," and proceeded to make these five little bastards. I despised some of these kids so much that I found motivation in reading only to see if bad things would happen to them. But even when that ended up happening it didn't feel rewarding; it felt like these miserable children were still coming out on top because they had taken up my time.

Maybe I could have overlooked some of the lesser elements of this book I disliked if the writing wasn't so distracting. It honest to god felt like there was a simile forced into every single paragraph. No object could ever just be described, it had to be compared to something else. And there were constant asides and anecdotes from the past that were dredged up in detail just to explain how something in the present reminded a character of something that had happened to them before. Once or twice this is excusable, even welcomed, but this happened constantly to the point where the flow of the story suffered.

A common mention I saw in reviews before picking this one up was the frequent mention of animal violence. At face value I don't have an issue with difficult content because I understand that the presence of content in media does not necessarily mean the endorsement of said content. But here it just didn't feel justified within the context of the story and came across more like a box being checked off to accomplish a cheap shock. I also struggle to discern any larger theme or idea of the story; the best that I can come up with is, "sometimes science experiments go too far"? But even that doesn't exactly hold up when it's eventually revealed that the very inciting incident of the plot was part of a larger experiment.

Maybe my disappointment stems from the fact that I wanted this book to be something more than it was ever intended to be.

Nick Cutter cites Stephen King’s “Carrie” as an influence, but this book felt closer to King’s “Thinner” mixed with “The Lord of the Flies.”

The story centers on five 14-year-old scouts and their scoutmaster on a camping trip on a small island off Canada’s Atlantic coast. Their excursion is interrupted by the sudden arrival of an emaciated and insatiably ravenous man who turns out to be an escaped test subject from some extremely unethical human trials. Hilarity ensues.

This book is one of the most intense horror novels I’ve read in years. Characters are well rendered, few in number, and their situation desperate. It has some of the most squirm-inducing descriptions of violence and self-mutilation since the 80s Splatterpunk movement. This novel is not for the squeamish, but I found it to be an incredibly compelling page-turner.

This probably isn’t suitable for casual horror fans—people who stick with King and Koontz and think gross-out horror is a crutch for authors who can’t create an atmosphere of terror—but if you’re comfortable with the deeper end of the pool this book is a hell of a ride.

It's been a long while since I read a horror book that got under my skin the way the genre used to do to me when I was a kid. The Troop came awfully close to bringing back that love of reading a book under the covers with a flashlight, grossing out and staying up way too late to find out who survives until the end.

The premise is great for a gross-out plot, and the book really delivers on that angle. Fans of gore won't be disappointed. The Troop won't win any awards for character development, but I found myself enjoying the old morality play archetypes that tend to populate horror novels and movies. It was fun predicting who would die, and how horribly, based on how deep and severe their sins had been. The breakdown of society, Lord of the Flies stuff is likewise predictable, but in a similar way I didn't mind at all. It felt nostalgic to me rather than derivative, a throwback to the way horror stories were written in the '70s when I first became a fan of the genre.

This isn't a book for everybody. Bad things happen to kids, and sometimes those evils are perpetrated by those kids upon each other. That's going to upset a lot of people. Even though I'm a fan of horror, which often involves bad things happening to kids, there were many parts of the book that were difficult for me to read. Nothing was bad enough to make me stop reading, in fact I tended to read faster and for longer intervals of time in the hopes that the punishment would fit the crimes. Those elements definitely added to the atmosphere and made the book really scary. There is also animal cruelty, which usually bothers me a great deal. I didn't find it to be off-putting in this book because it flowed organically from the plot, and it was in no way glorified. Still, I would only recommend the book to some of my friends because I know a lot of people who won't read books containing any mention of cruelty or abuse to kids and animals. The friends who can get past those elements and share my taste in horror fiction will enjoy this book a great deal.

I found myself wishing I had read it as a kid, preferably by the light of a campfire, reading it aloud with my friends. It was fun to read a book that made me feel like a kid again.