The Troop is a great combination of Dreamcatcher and The Body. It takes place from the perspectives of multiple Scouts and a Scout leader trapped on aThe Troop is a great combination of Dreamcatcher and The Body. It takes place from the perspectives of multiple Scouts and a Scout leader trapped on an island with a vicious parasite. As the story unfolds, we learn more about the origin of the parasite, and its physical and psychological effects on its hosts.
What makes The Troop so great is its refusal to back away from any of the implications of its premise. It consistently escalates tension, throwing bigger and thornier problems at the protagonists while showing how each character is uniquely suited to certain aspects of survival. All of this makes for a very quick and dirty read. You'll want a shower afterwards.
Cutter has an even hand with his protagonists, taking a "tough but fair" approach to their strengths and weaknesses. Your sympathies can ride with almost anybody throughout the story, and you'll catch yourself shifting allegiances almost without noticing it, pinning your hopes on one boy and then another if only so that one might survive the ordeal. And Cutter is right to make the least sympathetic characters the adults -- content alone is what keeps this from being a straight YA story, but even then it's the kind of thing that young kids who loved Lord of the Flies, or other horror novels, will probably eat up with a spoon. The best part of this story, in many ways, is its exposure of the howling void at the core of adulthood. It's also a delightfully nasty exploration of the impact of fathers on their boys, and on the meaning of fatherhood for boys.
One thing, though: some of the mannerisms are a little anachronistic, almost as though they were left over from a draft that took place in an earlier time period. The boys don't swear at each other nearly enough (their insults to each other are adorably low-impact), and they don't make reference to the technologies of their time period (although their are clearly advanced technologies at play in the story). It's the little things, like interior monologues about egg salad sandwiches. Does anybody still pack egg salad for their kids? And one boy is named Shelley -- do people still name their kids this way? None of these details matter to the purpose of the plot, but they did kick me out a bit and made me start wondering about the setting. On the other hand, I was reading an ARC. It's entirely possible that these little details have been stripped out of the final copy.
One more thing: if you read to the end, you'll notice a final scene, about a page or two long, that may change the gesture of the story depending on how you interpret it. This is something else that may be removed from the final copy, and I hope that it is. I thought the pages just before that scene were poignant and well-wrought; the story needed nothing further to be complete. If you're looking for a gory, disgusting, summer horror read that's a dark twist on a kids' adventure story, this one might be for you....more
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