Horror Book Review: The Troop (Nick Cutter)

Advertised on Amazon (June 2023) as Tiktok’s favourite horror novel, The Troop is a 2014 horror novel written by Canadian author Craig Davidson under the pen name Nick Cutter. Why is it Tiktok’s favourite horror novel? Who knows. What we can tell you is that it is a horrific, visceral, and frightening horror read.

The story revolves around five teenage boys named Max, Ephraim, Newt, Kent, and Shelley. Scouts, who alongside their Scoutmaster Tim, are spending the weekend away on a small and remote island off the coast of the town they all live in. The goal for the Scout brigade is to simulate a remote living experience with little to no communication with the mainland.

This proves to be a problem when an unknown man arrives on the island via a small boat. A malnourished and impoverished man who seems to be sick. He’s so weak that he’s no threat, so guided by his humanity, Tim decides to help the man as best he can. Yet, when he really looks over him, it seems as though he shouldn’t even be alive. His body is a wreck, he seems to have a ravenous hunger, and when Tim touches him, he feels something move inside his body.

Driven to do something for him, Tim makes a shocking discovery. This man has some kind of mutant worm living within in and it is desperate to infect others. What started off as a simple weekend of simulated survival turns into a desperate struggle to escape the horrors of the island.

Nick Cutter goes for revulsion over everything else here, that is the ultimate takeaway from this book. His descriptive style of writing will make you shiver and squirm as the infection spreads through the group. It calls to something primal in the reader, the fear of having something growing inside you. Something eating you alive, sucking the life out of you, until it can move on to someone else. Imagine the feeling of something wriggling around inside your stomach. Imagine the feeling of being so hungry that you’d eat dirt, but you’d never feel full. That is what Nick Cutter nails here.

The other aspects of the novel, the characters and their relationships suffer because of this, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely lacking. Nick Cutter gives each their own individual position in the group which allows their experience to step into slight ‘Lord of the Flies’ territory. Some of the tensest moments of the read involve the kids turning on each other. Even if some of it pushes the realism aspect a bit too far.

Yet, they’re all likable in their own ways. You will desperately want a happy ending, even if the clever use of reports, newspaper snippets, and interviews tell you otherwise. These segments come between chapters and help give you the grander picture of just what is going on. How did this man get infected with the worm? Why won’t the military help the kids? What was the result of this horrible incident? It’s good reading.

Which sums up the novel nicely. You will need to have a strong stomach for parts of it, but you won’t be able to put it down.