The Troop

A few times here, On The Blog, I’ve lamented the state of horror fiction. Horror is one of my favourite genres in movies, TV and games, but I rarely find a horror novel that does it for me. Even amateur internet horror has more hits for me than professionally-published horror fiction.

For a while now I’ve been aware of Nick Cutter’s The Troop, which according to Amazon is “TikTok’s favourite horror novel” so you know it must be good. It’s also got the enthusiastic approval of Stephen King, so again, you know it must be good.

But is it?

This is actually not my first encounter with Cutter’s work. A few years ago I read a chunk of The Deep and found the story setup interesting, but the execution didn’t grab me, largely due to the characters and their psychologies and personalities not being very interesting. There might be some foreshadowing there.

The Troop is about a troop, of Canadian teenage Scouts. They’re on an island for a camping trip when an emaciated, starving man arrives on a boat. Their Scoutmaster doesn’t handle the sudden intrusion particularly well, which is bad because the man isn’t just regular hungry–he’s Big Hungry, on account of the deadly engineered parasite he’s carrying, and the military have quarantined the island to stop it from spreading. The boys are on their own…which is even more of a problem than it sounds like, because one of them is a budding serial killer who decides that their current predicament is just the right time to graduate from animal victims to humans.

The plot is told through two parallel strands, one a conventional narrative starting with the arrival of the infected man on the island, and the other an epistolary story presented via in-world documents like news and magazine articles, interviews and lab notes, which both explains the wider circumstances of the outbreak that the boys aren’t aware of and provides some tantalizing hints from after the conclusion of the linear narrative. The book uses this conceit to great effect, often by providing foreshadowing for events that haven’t happened yet in the other half (one particularly delightful chapter gives the reader a full, gory view of the horrifying effects of late-stage parasite infestation on primates just as multiple infections on the island are starting to reach critical mass).

The other utility of this split narrative is that it lets the reader in on information that makes the story scarier or more tragic. We know how much peril the boys and Scoutmaster Tim are in well before they do, which adds a thrilling “Nooo don’t go in there!” dimension to the early chapters while making sure that the plot never needs to make the characters act stupid or irrational to function. At one point the boys witness a failed rescue attempt by two men in a boat, unaware that the men are actually two of their fathers. In fact in general, the way the story is told really enhances the military quarantine aspect, which to the Scouts is an inscrutable background element until quite late in the book (why isn’t anyone coming to get us, and what are these weird black ships lurking on the horizon?), but to the reader is clearly communicated as a dire threat that makes their situation even more hopeless than they perceive it to be.

At this point I should probably address whether the book is actually scary, and the answer is that it depends on what scares you. This is very much a horror novel that’s more interested in being horrifying than creepy or unsettling; the effects of the parasite on the human body are truly the stuff of nightmares, and although the book seems initially like it’s going to shy away from letting the reader see the full scope of that devastation inflicted on fourteen year old boys, by the second half of the story that is definitely not the case. This thing goes all the way, then continues going until it reaches a point you probably didn’t think was possible in commercially-published fiction. If you’re squeamish about body horror or reading about children suffering, this is going to turn your hair white. If you’re a parent, you’ll probably have a hard time with it.

Personally, I thought the gore passed a point where it stopped being shocking and just turned into campy, over the top fun. In particular, the book reserves the worst excesses for the two least-sympathetic members of the troop–one of whom is a literal murderer by the end–which softens the impact of the body horror a bit.

In aggregate, in general, I like the way the boys are depicted. The book doesn’t make the common adult author mistake of treating teenagers like eight year olds, but it also doesn’t treat them like fully-grown adults either. They’re upset by things you would expect fourteen year olds to be upset by, while being relatively unphased by things that would unbalance an adult but which teenagers don’t really have the capacity to grasp yet. Case in point is the opening chapters, where the adult Scoutmaster is completely psychologically undone by the arrival of the infected man and the sudden weight it places on his responsibility to look after the scouts, whereas the boys take things relatively in stride and are quite pragmatic about dealing with the situation, at least until the two shitheads of the group assert control and things start going a bit Lord Of The Flies.

The characters are stuck in a delicate and precise point in their growth: they still have the innocence of children that lets them shrug off or simply not consider the sorts of wider existential worries that would torment an adult in this kind of situation, but they’re just enough lacking in maturity that they don’t respond well when their plans go wrong, and they often don’t see potential dangers that are outside their scope of experience until it’s too late. I thought all of this was very well-observed.

You know what isn’t well-observed? The totally radical Authentic Teenage Dialogue. Here’s some samples:

…who’d win in a fight: a zombie or a shark?

“A zombie,” Eef said. “Of course. It’s already dead, right? It’s not gonna be scared of … hey, what kind of shark? A sandy? A whitetip? I could win against a sandy!”

Max shook his head. “Great white. Biggest badass in the ocean.”

“Pfffffft!” Eef said. “Killer whales got it all over great whites. But anyway, I still say zombie. If it gets one bite in, it wins—the shark’s a zombie!”

“Who says sharks turn into zombies?”

“Everything turns into a zombie, Max-a-million.”

You know, the way teenage boys talk.

This tapers off pretty quickly and is no longer an issue by about a third of the way into the book, but it was bad enough early on that I almost put the book down multiple times before I reached that point (bad dialogue is one of my number-one pet peeves).

You’ll notice I haven’t been talking much about the individual members of the titular Troop. That’s because the characters are where the book starts to get a little rocky.

A lot of time is spent giving the boys interesting backstories and solid foundations for character arcs, which was encouraging early on. And two of the main characters—group bully Kent and junior sociopath Shelley—bring those arcs to satisfying conclusions, in terms of their ultimate fates arising naturally from their personalities.

The other three are a different story. One of them ends up descending into paranoid madness in a plot turn that felt way too abrupt and also had nothing to do with the primary character flaw that had until that point been the focus of his arc. One of them has the most interesting character arc in the whole story, but the way that arc ends feels like it’s more down to random luck than anything to do with him specifically.

The last character ends up occupying the “final boy” position and thus is the de facto main character of the story once all the dust settles. The problem is that he’s by far the least interesting character out of all of them; despite finishing the book only a few days ago, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about him besides his parents’ occupation. I had him pegged early on as the character who’d get killed off randomly halfway through to raise the stakes, and I was honestly shocked when I realised where the story was going with him instead.

I think the problem here is that the book is trying to simultaneously be a very artificial story where the characters’ fates are tied to their flaws and foibles in a narratively satisfying way, and simultaneously wants to be a gritty, realistic “shit happens” plot where the kids get randomly killed off like in real life. The problem is that it takes the former approach for the first half, which primes the reader to form certain expectations, before switching over to the latter approach.

Combined with the blandest character becoming the focus of the plot, this left me feeling inescapably unsatisfied when I finished the book. The events of the plot are fine, and there are some really beautiful moments when the book focuses on the boys’ emotional responses rather than the body horror, but the story is empty. It’s a thrill-ride that ends with a shrug instead of a feeling of exhilaration.

So, does The Troop deserve to be TikTok’s Favourite Horror Novel? Well probably not, because TikTok has horrible taste so that’s not exactly a compliment. I’d say it deserves to be somewhere in the middle doldrums of TikTok’s horror ratings, which is where I’d also put it in my personal estimation.