2025 Reading Challenge 17 The Troop
A switch to more modern horror. I knew nothing about this. Somehow, it made its way into social media adverts, but it seemed like a bit of a successor to James Herbert and that ilk. Note that Nick Cutter is a pseudonym of Craig Davidson, a Canadian author whose written some pretty diverse and challenging stuff under a range of different names and his own.
The Troop follows a group of scouts and their scout master as they plan for a weekend of dib-dib-dob-dob adventures on a small deserted island. Some teen tensions develop amongst the smores and woggles, that is, until a very sick man arrives by boat.
There are some small-town musings on the relationships between the boys and the scout master, which is prime Stephen King. Settling you into a cosy, comfy story of good neighbours and a wholesome society, just before it all collapses into a pile of blood, offal and inhuman screams.
As the story progresses, it focuses on how the scouts pull together, grow, and in some cases break, as they try to resolve things beyond their experiences.
The book was entertaining, a real call back to the horror stories of my youth, from James Herbert, Stephen King and their ilk. Normal folk doused in the worst of circumstances. Particularly, there are some very visceral descriptions of these horrors and their effects on the main cast, these are without boundaries and, if you are an animal lover, some very hard to read sections.
Interwoven with the scout and scout master scenes are a series of medical and courtroom dispositions that help build up a wider, more sinister conspiracy theory and add hooks for possible future books.
Here is a fairly tame example of one of these descriptions, you’ve been warned!
"The man was skeletal. His skin was stretched thin as a drumhead over the jut of his bones. His eyes were too large, sunken deep into his sockets, shining feverishly. His body twitched constantly — not from cold, but from something inside him, something that seemed to crawl beneath his skin. When he opened his mouth to speak, the smell that rolled out was not merely bad — it was wrong. Rotten. Wet. Hungry."
I rated it 6.6 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts
SPOILERS.
I am very much into Liminal Horror, a survival horror TTRPG, and this book is packed with background for those types of games, especially around the mechanics of Fallout.
Fallout is Liminal Horror’s way of mechanically implementing “how Investigators change as a result of encountering the weird, strange, and horrific.” In the case of some of the Scouts, they find deeper reserves of bravery and resourcefulness; in the case of Shelley, they morph into a hideous spider god, embued with imaginary (?) powers, Eph becomes immune to pain though psychologically broken.
So whilst in some RPGs like Call of Cthulhu, the exposure to the strange is wholly bad, in Liminal Horror, power and benefits are sometimes given alongside physical deformities or mental trauma.
One aspect is clear, though the book shows how the boys, aside from one, come together to help each other, and these Bonds both support them in times of great challenge, but also fray and break the longer the horrors go on. Here, Bud’s RPG Review explains the mechanical use of Bonds in Delta Green.