Nick Cutter’s THE TROOP (winner of the inaugural James Herbert Award for Horror Writing) was not a book I would have sought out. I’d never heard of the 2014 horror novel before, but I set myself the task one day to buy all the novels in the horror section of a local bookstore and this was one of those novels. My daughter, however, had read THE TROOP in high school and insisted I read it, so I moved it up in the rotation. I’m glad I did. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a horror novel where the author was so obviously focusing on the HORROR. It’s horror of the gross-out variety, but I’ll take it.
THE TROOP deals with a five-man scout troop and their Scoutmaster as they spend the weekend on a nearby island, free of distractions such as cell phones and the like. On their first night on the island, however, they’re joined by a mysterious stranger who’s sick with an even more mysterious illness, one that causes his body to waste away while making him voraciously hungry, so much so he begins to eat algae and moss just to satisfy the hole in his belly.
It’s soon discovered the man is riddled with tapeworms, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the boys begin to notice military boats floating just outside the perimeter of the island, yet no one is coming to help them. They’ll have to fend for themselves against the elements and each other as the infection spreads.
Nick Cutter (pseudonym for Canadian author Craig Davidson) tells a compelling story with some of the most graphic yet mild language I’ve ever read. I usually have to go the more extreme route via someone like Ed Lee if I want to be grossed out, but Cutter is able to convey the same gut-churning response in a mainstream mass market horror novel, and I have to applaud the skills.
His descriptions of what the worms can do did nothing for me as I read this book on breaks at work, including my lunch break where I usually have one flavor of microwave Raman or another. So while I was never necessarily SCARED reading THE TROOP, I was grossed out a number of times over its 355-page run.
It wasn’t all squirms and writhing, however. There were a few spots where I felt Cutter may have been trying to pad for word length or this was the work of an early writer still learning the ropes. That last, however, is NOT the case—Davidson has been writing as Cutter since 2014, but he’s been publishing under his own name and another pseudonym, Patrick Lestewka, since 2003 (the first time I ever encountered his writing was in 2003 with the novella MOTHER BITCHFIGHT and the novel THE PRESERVE, both published by Necro Publications where I served as copyeditor, so, unbeknownst to me until 5 seconds ago, I was reading Davidson before almost anyone else, and was a HUGE fan back then). But still, the first half of the novel is riddled with asides.
For example he’ll say something like “The rocks were grey”, then follow it up with something like “like the curtains in his bedroom, which his mother had made for him. They didn’t have a lot of money, so many of the things in their house were handmade by his mother, including the curtains, and many of his shirts. He was wearing one of those shirts right now, in fact.”
This isn’t an actual quote, I’m making it up as an example of the constant asides that pepper much of THE TROOP. In one instance, I counted TWO asides in a three-paragraph span!
But eventually the writing leveled out and these went away.
What didn’t go away, and I was happy they didn’t, were the “extratextual materials” in the form of newspaper and magazine excerpts, plus court transcripts placed between some chapters, each giving a glimpse of life after the main narrative while also serving as background material so we can piece together how things got to where they were when the novel started. I loved these sections. And yes they bring to mind a certain first published novel by a certain incredibly famous horror writer from Maine, but Cutter (Davidson) says upfront CARRIE was a huge inspiration. I don’t know what others thought of the extratextual stuff, but I really dug it.
I am now finished with THE TROOP and I have to give my daughter credit for suggesting it; this was a very well-constructed novel. I felt the characters were each well-defined enough, but to be honest it wasn’t until way too late in the book that I could discern some (Newt, Max, and Eef, to be precise) from each other. Others, though, Kent and Shelly, were way more easily-recognizable from the start, but none of this hindered my enjoyment of the novel. For sheer plot strength, storytelling, and descriptive language, THE TROOP is tops, a really worthwhile read. Just maybe wait until you’re not munching a bowl of noodles to read most of the more graphic tapeworm passages…