Horror Annotation - The Troop

Picture retrieved from www.amazon.com

General Information

Author: Nick Cutter

Title: The Troop

Genre: Horror

Publication Date: February 25, 2014

Number of Pages: 368 (Hardcover)

Geographical Setting: A remote fictional island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada

Time Period: Present or near future – no exact date. The technology that was mentioned (cell phones, transmitter radios, boat motors) was relevant in the present, and didn’t seem incredibly outdated.

Plot Summary

Have you ever been hungry? Insatiably hungry? So ravenous that you swear you’re being eaten from the inside out? If not, consider yourself one of the lucky ones.

Each year, Scoutmaster (and town doctor) Tim Riggs brings his troop of scouts to the remote island just off the North Point, Prince Edward Island shore, for a weekend of camping, camaraderie, and utter solitude. The boys in Tim’s troop are aging out of scouts, but he remains a loyal scoutmaster for as long as they will stay. Each boy – Kent, Max, Ephraim, Newton and Shelley – plays some role in the group, and Tim sees each growing into the men that they will someday become. He is confident in some, and uneasy about others – and his instincts tell him that he must be careful and alert, as something dark is lurking.

On the first night of their trip, a sick, emaciated, confused man appears on the island, by way of a boat. He is hungry – deathly hungry – and begs Tim for food. Upon bringing the man into the cabin and examining him, Tim sees just how sickly this man is – and as the man worsens, Tim tries to save him. His efforts are wasted as the man dies, and the truth of his sickness is revealed – a bio-engineered, gigantic worm is living in his stomach, eating all the man's food, and destroying his body, until there is nothing left of him. What’s worse is that through a simple cough, this man has infected Tim, and the troop has no idea what to do to help.

Throughout the course of the next 36 hours, Tim and the boys are terrified to experience just how deadly and destructive this worm is. Infection is running rampant, as it is carrier, water, and air-borne, and no one is safe from its reach. The boys witness their humanity dissolving as, one by one, they realize just what they will do when they are desperate and at the end of their lives. Some fall prey to the sickness, while some capitalize on the fear and engage in mental games to terrorize one another. As time goes on, the boys realize that the help they expected to come has abandoned them, and they are completely on their own, facing the kind of killer that they have absolutely no control over.

Through narration, and futuristic documents from courtroom and clinical trials, this story unfolds as a tale of how easily things could go incredibly wrong – and how powerless the human race is to stop it.

Elements of Horror

Foreboding Tone/Pacing

Throughout the entire book, there is an overall foreboding/uneasy tone, which adds a deep sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop”. The characters have very slow moments – walking around the island, searching for food, sitting by the campfire – which absolutely make the reader squirm as it is evident that buildup is occurring.

Likewise, the pacing of this story is fairly common for a horror story. Each character has a great deal of internal thinking and conflict, which takes up time throughout the story – these quieter moments are punctuated by sharp, gruesome action scenes that sometimes take the reader by surprise.

Monsters

Within this story is an incredible tale of a man-made monster that was generated from a nature-made creature. The engineer of this disgusting worm was a doctor that understood worms’ abilities to survive and thrive, and capitalized on those for the development of his monster. This bio-engineered worm was designed to prey upon its host, thereby making it one of the most disgusting and terrifying monsters available.

Flawed Protagonists

With the exception of one character (the survivor), each of the protagonists in this story are flawed and struggling with their own demons. One of the scouts serves more as an antagonist, though the argument could be made that the true antagonist is the worm/disease. Regardless, all of the protagonists have character flaws such as temerity, brashness, anger issues, penchant for violence, etc.

Graphic Violence

This story has graphic violence as a part of the storyline, whether characters inflicted it upon one another, or upon themselves. Scenes in which the author describes the wasted bodies of the victims are horrific; scenes that describe the violence one character inflicts on himself as a result of a mental breakdown is absolutely disgusting. Even the violence that is described as a necessary evil (i.e. when Tim was attempting to operate on the stranger to save him) is graphic. The author uses phrases that are both graphic and elegant (i.e. “the skin peeled back gently as he cut”) that contributes to the overall uneasy tone of the book.

 

Uncertain Fate

At the conclusion of this story, all but one of the characters’ fates had been decided by death. However, the survivor’s fate is very uncertain – he ends up in a quarantine facility for some time, and, when he returns home, finds his community unable and unwilling to interact with him. Moreover, he has difficulty battling the his mental and emotional challenges that came about as a result of this situation, and finds himself uncertain of where those will lead him.

Book Read-Alikes

Ancestors – Scott Sigler (June 2010)

On a remote island near Canada, doctors and researchers make a game changing medical discovery when they find a computer-engineered creature whose organs can be implanted in any subject without the fear of rejection. However, as time goes on, these doctors find that the creature is not what it seems, and with it, only death is certain.

Ancestors and The Troop share similar elements of a remote location providing the breeding ground for an organism that is highly dangerous to humans. Additionally, both books demonstrate how situations can quickly spiral out of control when working with human-engineered living beings.

The Ritual – Aaron Neville (February 2012)

In this suspenseful/horror book, a group of college friends go hiking together in a remote forest in an effort to rebuild their relationships, and end up getting lost on the trip. The situation quickly dissolves as the hikers turn on one another and realize they are being hunted by a bestial predator.

Similarly to The Troop, The Ritual follows a group of friends as they navigate wholly unfamiliar terrain and find themselves doing their best to escape from a predator that they do not fully understand or know how to defeat.

Roosevelt’s Beast – Louis Bayard

This novel of historical fiction recounts the trip that Theodore Roosevelt took with his son, Kermit, to the Amazon in 1914. After battling disease and hunger, the travelers are captured by Amazon warriors and forced to hunt a dangerous and unknown beast

While The Troop features an internal beast, both stories feature an unknown opponent that threaten the lives of the protagonist while they are physically trapped in a location they cannot escape. 

Author Read-Alikes 

Stephen King – www.stephenking.com 

Both Cutter and King use vivid language, believable scenarios that build into horrific experiences, and well-developed characters. Each author also employs an element of psychological suspense that adds to the general horror of the situation.

Scott Sigler – www.scottsigler.com

Sigler is known for writing books where natural and engineered elements collide, creating wide-spread and panic inducing situations that humans struggle to rectify. His writing is direct, explicit, and designed to scare readers.

Mira Grant - www.miragrant.com

Cutter and Grant write books that involve biological/bio-engineered catastrophes that go horribly wrong while maintaining an initially believable element. 

Reader Commentary **SPOILER ALERT**

After reading this book, I am so surprised at how much I liked reading it! I’m not sure if it was the novelty of the genre (I never read horror) or what, but I could not put this book down! I initially chose it after reading the review that Stephen King wrote: “The Troop scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t put it down. It is old-school horror at its best.” I figured if I must venture into this world, I would do it upon recommendation of one of the masters.

Cutter did an excellent job of developing multi-layered, intriguing characters that the reader cannot help but root for. Although Tim departed the book early, I thought he was a very thoughtful, well-written character who maintained his humanity for as long as possible. I was equally intrigued by Newton and Shelley and Kent who represented a trifecta of different personalities that were represented, and different ways that the characters represented fear, anger and acceptance.

I appreciated the way that Cutter wrote this book, with the interjections of courtroom testimony and transcripts from clinical trials from the tapeworm. The inclusion of these documents rounded out the story and I especially appreciated (hated?) reading the description of what happened to the monkey and guinea pig who were test subjects for this drug.

I was surprised that Max was the character to survive. After reflecting on the book, I know that it was really a matter of chance, but he seemed to be the least developed character at the end – but maybe that was intentional? The end of the book showed him at a quarantine hospital, and later in his hometown, where he cannot or will not interact with people and is haunted by what has happened (understandably). He seems to just be a shell. I do wonder if some of the other characters that had stronger development would have reacted in a different way.

Overall - I am not sure horror is a genre that I will follow closely - but I am excited that I liked this book so much! It's like seeing a scary movie - not something I want to do every time I see a movie, but I certainly enjoy getting scared. I was very pleased with my experiment in this genre.