Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. A horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival with no escape from the elements, the infected…or one another.
You know this is going to be good when the King himself blurbs the book saying it "scared the hell out of [him]", and Jesus Christ on toast, was this scary. This might be the scariest book I've read in a while, possibly ever.
This is what I'm always looking for in contagion novels: a source of the contagion (because then there are so many more questions), the first contact with the contagion, and then the fallout from that contagion, done so in a really creepy, scary way. An added benefit in this book is the fact that they are on an uninhabited island with little way of contacting the mainland, so that added to the tension and horror-ness of the book. Because, how un-scary would it be if they had their phones and were in a really densely populated area and could alert the authorities at any time. AND, to top it all off, the threat of a treacherous storm is always looming in the background. The perfect combination for this book. I probably should have waited to read this in October, around Halloween, but I really wanted to read The Troop as soon as possible.
The tapeworms in this book (the bioengineered nightmare) are so creepy. The whole organization behind it reminded me of MKUltra a little bit, only a lot more ... squrimy (pardon the pun). A piece of advice: don't eat while reading this book, or read it right before going to bed. This is one of those books that gets your paranoia going strong. I think for the next little while, I will be suspicious whenever I am really hungry.
Nick Cutter proves once again that he is a master in writing a horror story that is compelling, dark, and most importantly, SCARY. And not just scary-scary, but painfully scary. This book is not for the squeamish or faint of heart. This is a body horror meets contagion, meets survival, meets an almost MKUltra organization kind of scary. I've never seen body horror done in this way before. Not only does Nick Cutter show the actual contagion in a really scary way, he shows the fallout from the contagion and the risk of it spreading in a really scary way. A mistake I made while inhale-reading this last night was eating while reading it at one point, hence why I gave that piece of advice about not eating while reading this book at the same time.
I thought it was really neat how Nick Cutter paid homage to Stephen King's first novel Carrie in The Troop by way of using interviews and newspaper articles to advance the plot. The plots of both these books could not be more disparate and far away from each other in terms of what goes on and what the final outcome is in each book. It worked really well in Carrie, and it works really well for The Troop.
The characters were all different. Teenage boys are scary to begin with, but this was on a whole other level. This was on a Lord of the Flies level of how society crumbles and how people turn on each other when the chips are down. At first I was a bit skeptical about how unlikeable (most of) the boys in this book were, but it worked to the book's advantage. It added to the overall horror, and by the end of it, you are sympathetic for even the most unlikeable of the characters (except, perhaps, with the villainous character). Even though some of them are unlikeable, they are still complex, and while they are horrible people some of them, they are great, well-developed characters and add to the amazing study that Nick Cutter has going on about the breakdown of a society in the event of an outbreak of contagion. It was really compelling. The balance between the good people and the less good people was a good one, and as the story progressed, you see that not all of the less-savoury ones are actually like that.
The Troop is a fantastic novel. It kept me up late because I couldn't put it down. With a squirmy and painfully scary horror, this book was everything I wanted it to be. The writing is amazing, the horror never lets up, and the characters work well for the story. In paying homage to Stephen King's Carrie though story-telling methods, Nick Cutter tells his own, completely different, story wonderfully. I loved every page of this book. It was an interesting study on how civilization, no matter how small, can break down in the event of a disaster. The Troop definitely gets 5/5 - this book is masterfully, painfully scary.
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