The Troop: Horrors, Horrors, Everywhere!

In the second book I've read from author Nick Cutter, the horror of biological warfare takes a ride with another horror that is much less fantastical: other people.

I'm definitely enjoying Nick Cutter's work. The Deep was a fantastic blend of underwater scifi horror mixed with Lovecraftian horrors and paranoia; in The Troop, Cutter still takes some big swings - the main conflict surrounds a bio-engineered threat taking over a small island currently inhabited by a scoutmaster and his troupe of 5 teenagers - but as the story progresses, what really held me was the way he crafted the people on the island facing this threat.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The scene opens with "the hungry man," stopping through a diner and devouring as much food as he can before he shambles out into a small fishing community on Prince Edward Island on Canada's northeastern coast. He ends up in a boat and heads out to see, towards the normally deserted Falstaff Island; however, this is the weekend that scoutmaster Tim Riggs has taken his small troupe out for a wilderness retreat.

I'm not going to get too spoiler-y with this post, because I really did find some genuine surprises as I was going through, and it's more fun to have the twists revealed. Some ear easily guessed, but Cutter still manages to maintain a tight tension even as you know what's coming. The bio-terror that the hungry man brings to Falstaff Island starts to affect Tim and his five teen charges, and there is a lot of body horror for those looking for blood and guts and gore. Like in The Deep, there are a few scenes that feature animals that might make some uncomfortable, but they don't feel at all superfluous. They matter, and they help develop what I felt was the main conflict in the book: the horrors of other people.

As the troops try to navigate this terrible new threat, and it becomes clearer and clearer that no one is coming to help, we see the relationship s between the boys change and evolve. As we learn more about them and their family lives, the characters that are presented are so different and interesting, and they represent a really interesting collection of personalities. The transformations that occur on the island are horrifying, but what is equally as horrifying is what can lie behind a bland expression, a blank stare.

One of the elements that I really enjoyed is that Cutter deployed a similar tactic that Stephen King used in my favorite of his novels, Carrie. In between different POV chapters of the inhabitants of Falstaff Island, he interspersed "official records" from after the events of the main story: court transcripts of testimony about the biological creation, exceprts from articles and non-fiction books written about the events, research records, etc. These give some of the wider context to what was happening on the mainland during the events, occasionally they drop little hints about what is coming, and they help establish the wider story of how these events came to happen. They also raise questions about the role of adults in protecting children: over and over we see the adults of Prince Edward Island failing these children: from absent and abusive parents before the trip ever even happened, to military officials prioritizing containment over rescue, to people in charge being faced with something they just don't know how to handle. The boys begin with this childlike sense that the adults will always know what to do, and that they will protect, and we see those illusions shattered little by little, one by one.

It's strangely affecting, and it represents a whole other kind of horror that extends far beyond this tiny, doomed island and into the real world: the horror of growing up.