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.