The Troop is a really disgusting book. That is a compliment. There were places where I wanted to stop reading, for it to just go away, but I couldn't help myself: I had to know what was going to happen.
The plot begins with simple ingenuity: a troop of boy scouts are trapped on an island where something is going terribly wrong and they must battle an unspeakable horror. And then it is ratcheted up: one of the scouts is a budding sadistic psychopath. Think Lord of the Flies meets The Thing meets World War Z meets I Am Legend meets Alien meets Hot Twink Boy Scout Measuring Contest or Scouting for Wood, with a reference to Anne of Green Gables to push it over the top.
The combination is delicious, tense and, as I said, disgusting. The plight of the scouts is horrible and rendered in purple but precise prose that reveals author Nick Cutter's day job as literary writer Craig Davidson (though who gets to decide that definition is beyond me). There are pages - particularly concerning a monkey and a kitten in my case - that made me want to shield my eyes. There will be different pages for other people with individual sensibilities: there are lots of horrors and gollops of gore to choose from.
There is a thread of homoeroticism that runs throughout The Troop that is just more than subliminal. It is, alas, also confused, as if Cutter was - unbelievably considering what he does splay on the pages - afraid to go there. The only expressed sexuality is arousal by extreme sadism and the phallic nature of the worms give a disturbing contradiction to what Cutter seems to be trying to express. He is far more successful in drawing a direct but subtle line between the callousness of governments and power and the mind of a nascent serial killer. It all comes to fruition with a masterfully done macguffin built into the very structure that is emotionally devastating.
But most intriguing is Cutter's repeated theory that there is an innocence in childhood that allows one to withstand terror because one can believe in the unbelievable. He posits that as we reach adulthood we are no longer able to cope with horror or tragedy because we no longer have the ability to imagine it could happen.
It is an idea that resonates, gives a melancholy tinge and speaks to Cutter's intentions with what is already a very efficient and great genre novel, and makes the scouts' descent into adulthood and horror all the more affecting and brutal. Any horror fan child, or adult, will enjoy The Troop.
Full review at: http://drewrowsome.blogspot.ca/2015/09/the-troop.html
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Book great, condition not so much
I found the book interesting but when I received it (as seen in the pics) the book wasn’t cut properly (during production I’m assuming) and I had to separate the pages by hand…..as a book lover it kills me to see my pages rip just so I can read 🤷♀️
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