Have You Read This? Review of Nick Cutter's The Troop

Look at the picture of the hamburger below.

Take a good look at it. 

Is it making you hungry? Making you realize you’re missing lunch? Feeling a rumble in your stomach yet? Now imagine that hunger multiplied by ten. By a thousand. Imagine your hunger growing until your stomach is a bottomless cavern that cannot be filled no matter how much food or non-food you put into it. This is the enemy facing the young scouts in Nick Cutter’s The Troop.

The troop in question is a boy scout troop who go off on a camping trip to an island with their trusted scout master, but they soon face a terrifying coming of age when their scoutmaster falls ill after being infected by a mysterious stranger called the Hungry Man.

Those who have read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies will find much of that plot repeated here; basically, the boys left without adult supervision try their best to survive but ultimately make a mess of it. There are even characters in Cutter’s work that directly parallel those in Golding’s (the nerdy boy Newt for Piggy, the moral center Max for (boy’s name in Flies)). The rest of the boys feel like a who’s who of different archetypes used over and over in fiction, from troublemaker Eff to alpha-male in training Kent to oddball loner Shelly. The book depends a lot on these archetypes but does puts in the work of moving beyond them. Describing their own inner mental workings helps these boys push against the boundaries of their archetypes.

But what takes this tale beyond a Lord of the Flies remake are the worms that serve as the primary antagonist. These worms, like tapeworms on steroids, emaciate a body within a day, and the scenes showing them escaping the body and attempting to infect another host are graphic enough to make readers not want to look at the hamburger picture above while reading. Cutter also does a great job of incorporating news articles and testimony after the infection and the ordeal is over (of course, the scars do remain) that will draw readers in and shows the depth of evil for what could be the prime antagonist of the novel: the military industrial complex that allowed their monster worms to escape.

If you’re hungry for a story that juggles gross-outs and character development, give The Troop a chance, but I advise not reading it after you’ve had a big meal.