The Troop by Nick Cutter

Hello Beautiful People! Welcome back to another book review! For this review, I get into The Troop by Nick Cutter which I feel can be best described as an adult science fiction version of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Obviously, the two books are completely different but as soon as I started to get into this book I got the similar vibe I felt when I read Lord of the Flies in high school. I loved Lord of the Flies when it was assigned to us in school and finished it in a day, so I obviously loved The Troop by Nick Cutter. So, let’s get into it!

Some warnings for future readers:

•  Includes kid-on-kid violence

Main Characters:

• Tim Riggs: A local doctor who takes his scout group made up of teenage boys on a weekend camping trip in an isolated area in the Canadian wilderness, things go horrific when a mysterious illness is introduced to the group
• Shelly, Newton, Kent, Max and Ephraim: Go out on a scout excursion and are tested to their limits as to how adult they can be, and what they can handle

My Review

Being a Canadian, I always love supporting Canadian authors and getting to check out a book where the setting is at home. The Troop by Nick Cutter is a classic horror thriller novel in which 6 people go out into the woods and one by one they are picked off by a mysterious illness. This illness is no normal illness however and the group’s attempt for survival from not only the elements, but themselves becomes clear.

I thought The Troop was a super fun book, and like Lord of the Flies, it focuses more on the relationships and personality of the characters and not just the fact that they are stranded in a bad situation. I gave The Troop an 8.5/10 rating. While it had a fairly good pace for most of the book I did find it to slow down in parts, but the slow parts were fairly far and few between. I think books set in nature are always a bit tough but I found Cutter did a really good job with the descriptions. I mean I am Canadian but I could perfectly picture the wooded area the group is in, the sounds, and the elements.

With Tim Riggs, the boy’s scout master being the town’s local doctor you would think he would be the perfect person to be in this situation with the boys. However, he never could have expected an extremely sick man to stumble upon their campsite at night, and leave something with them that could take them all down. This book has an element of science fiction into it in terms of where this illness comes from. I enjoyed that throughout the book we would get this past and present look. The past is actually the time that the group is in the woods. The present is the interviews that seem to be going on with people connected to the illness. The illness causes the person who has it to have an incurable hunger, one so terrible that their bodies start to eat themselves. The person who has it takes to eat anything around them because the hunger never ends. When the mysterious man stumbles on the camp he is skin and bones and smells like a rotting corpse. What they don’t know is trying to help this stranger could be detrimental to them all.

This book is gross and gory but in a good way. It definitely adds to the element of horror in the book in which we get these descriptive parts in which the illness is taking over the host’s body. The reason that the illness is so fast-acting and gory is that it’s a worm, like a tapeworm times ten. The fact that the illness is an abrasive worm made my skin crawl. I am not sure why but getting a tapeworm has always scared the hell out of me so this being the plot just gave me goosebumps.

The reason that I got Lord of the Flies vibes from The Troops mostly has to do with the fact that the characters aren’t exactly similar but have similarities. The biggest similarity is the classic cast of characters. When it comes to the boys we have a set of characters that all have those distinctive differences that bring something interesting to the book. Newton is the overweight nerdy character who the others pick on, Kent is the classic bully who is big and just desperate to impress his Dad and gets satisfaction from dominating those smaller than him, Ephraim has father issues which are projected by anger issues, Shelly is the messed up one who likes to kill bugs and animals for fun, and Max is the fairly normal one. While having a set of characters like this is a bit cliché I honestly always enjoy it because it helps me differentiate what each character is supposed to bring to the story. Newton reminded me a lot of Piggy in Lord of the Flies in the way that he was the punching bag for the rest of the boys. I found it interesting because many of the other boys acknowledge that they treat him pretty unfairly but don’t want to be out of the group and continue to pick on him. While the book of course mainly focuses on the illness that overtakes the groups it also really focuses on the boys, their personalities, and their strengths and issues. Each boy is forced to question and look at themselves in a way they haven’t before and is pushed to question how far they would go for their survival. I’ll be honest there are a few parts in this book where the boys are pushed to do some pretty tough things and it’s a bit heartbreaking to see. As the reader in these parts, we are often reminded of their innocence and that these are not people who do these things regularly.

I really think Cutter’s writing skills are what made this book so incredibly hard to put down. He just had a way of pulling you from chapter to chapter desperate to see what was going to come next. His writing skills also just make the flow of this book runs so well in that there weren’t any choppy areas or areas I felt were put in just to be filler. Every piece in the book felt significant to either tell the story of the illness, or who the boys are to the core. For example, when the group realizes that no help is coming for them they are forced to hunt for survival. Some of the boys are a bit too comfortable with the activity, while others sob while having to do it. There are little areas like this sprinkled in meant to tell us more about the characters without really saying it. It felt a bit like a coming-of-age story (for some of the characters) that’s mixed into a terribly scary and gruesome horror story.

I think that anyone who loves a remote destination-based horror story, filled with science fiction elements and dynamic characters you definitely have to check this one out.

**** SPOILERS AHEAD ****

Alright so let’s get into who survives the ordeal and how the worm illness came about in the first place.

I actually ended up really enjoying the back story to the illness. As we all know we live in a terribly capitalist world where the rich are constantly thinking of every way that they can continue to suck the 99% dry. One of the biggest markets is diet, and elective surgeries right now, and as time goes on it continues to be a billion-dollar market. Essentially the wealthy want to think of ways of getting people to pay tons of money for things that they can realistically fix with things like a good diet and exercise (maybe not for plastic surgery but for diet things for sure) that are significantly cheaper but do realistically require more energy and effort. When the big corporations decide they want to make even more money they start experimenting with a tapeworm diet thing in which a person intakes a worm, which helps them lose weight, and then the worm exits. However, these experiments quickly lose control and they instead create a kind of invasive worm that eats the person from the inside out. So that’s how it starts. The mysterious man who shows up at the campsite is a test dummy for the corporations and he manages to get away from the site and ends up in the woods with the group. I lowkey was pissed at the guy because if I was being experimented on and was super sick the last thing I would do is try to get help from a group that’s majority kids, I mean just me but it seemed a bit selfish to me.

Tim is the first one to get sick from the man after he tries to treat him ultimately leaving the boys alone for at least the second half of the book. In classic Lord of the Flies style with the boys being alone together they quickly lose control and just end up wanting to overpower one another, and prove each other wrong. Max ends up being the only boy to survive. I wasn’t super surprised by this but I did think it would either be him or Newton. I also felt like it could have been Shelly since he was the one who went crazy and thought that he would be able to become one with the worms and wanted to kill all the other boys. Shelly just turns out to be an extremely disturbed kid but there was a part of me that was pulled in by his confidence that he could work with the worms rather than letting them take him over. Eventually, they do but it was interesting for sure to see him lose it mentally in a way the other characters didn’t. The government ends up trying to cover up the whole situation and Max is sent to a secure facility for a while, and then after he is treated like a leper. It seems like no one really serves any consequences for what happened and five lives being lost. At least not the consequences that they deserve that’s for sure.

******

Overall a super enjoyable but spine-chilling book. One with lots of themes, topics, and characters that get you thinking for sure. It is one of those books too that definitely makes you question what you would do if you were in this situation.

I hope you enjoyed this review! Have you checked out The Troop by Nick Cutter before? What did you think?

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