He wields empathy like a surgeon’s scalpel, conjuring intimate moments of real and brutal vulnerability so that when shit starts to go down and the island falls under the cloud of darkest fantasy, you still can’t escape the screaming. It puts us in a carnal reality, makes us aware of our senses, and then begins to make our most intimate space foreign to us.įor contagion horror to work like this, the reader needs to be able to self-insert. Contagion horror plays on the familiarity we have with our own bodies. Great horror is about the concepts we we think we know, explored to the point where we become sick with our own frail humanity and inability to truly comprehend anything, even ourselves. There are precedents to the terrors of this book. At times, when the narrative switched over to an infected character, eating the moss off of a rock or shovelling anything – anything – into his mouth, I was reminded of the living rage-zombies of 28 Weeks Later. It’s not a zombie book, but the rules of the walking dead sub-genres are at play. The Troop is fun to read, while constantly serving up different nuanced flavours of the uncanny, creepy, sublime, and bone chilling.Ī contagion horror story at its heart, The Troop doesn’t break new ground with its concept (beyond the fact that it is gloriously and unapologetically Canadian). The chapters are occasionally broken up with found documents, like testimony from a court case that took place after the event of the main plot, or a GQ article detailing an outsider’s perspective on the island’s creature feature.

Carefully paced as its narrator flips between its primary characters in order to give you a glimpse of the internal machinations, deep intimate secrets, paranoia, and hunger pangs of the scouts and their chauffeur, the novel always gives you just enough foreshadowed material to forecast the truly upsetting events to come. The Troop does just about everything right. What ensues is a modern version of Lord of the Flies with pocket knives and a zombie-like threat of cannibalism. On the first night, a gaunt man arrives, motivated by fear and an all-consuming hunger, contaminating the island with a nightmare strain of parasitic worm.

Tim Riggs, a scoutmaster on Prince Edward Island, brings his troop of five thirteen-year-old boys to the remote Falstaff Island for a excursion of merit-earning and campfiring. Nick Cutter’s The Troop is the kind of horror story that teaches you about the aching void at the core of your being.

The troop nick cutter review