Horrors worm their way into the mind
Gates of hell open onto an island for scout troop
Disgusting, deeply disturbing things happen in Nick Cutter’s novel The Troop. A helpless animal is tortured; desperate, ravenous characters gorge themselves on bugs and wallpaper; worms eat humans up alive.
And yet the reader — even one without an appetite for bugs or horror stories — is compelled to keep reading. That’s because Cutter does what the best horror writers do: He makes us care about his characters — at least most of them.
A kindly Prince Edward Island family doctor and volunteer Scoutmaster takes his Scout troop to a remote island for a weekend camping trip. Things go horribly wrong after an emaciated stranger turns up. Tim’s five young charges have been up half the night “telling ghost stories,” and yet even the most imaginative of the boys could never imagine what is about to befall them.
One thing that is not hard to imagine is Cutter’s ghoulish pleasure as he was writing this book. It’s jam-packed with creepy details that will linger in readers’ minds long after they have put down this book. The stranger resembles a “human boneyard.” A voice inside the Scoutmaster’s head sounds like “baby rats clawing.” Even the rocks on the island are covered with “snot like algae” and a flashlight glows “piglet-pink.”
Technically, this is Cutter’s first novel and an impressive debut. But there’s a hitch: Nick Cutter is a pseudonym for acclaimed Toronto short-story writer and novelist Craig Davidson, whose novel Cataract City was shortlisted for last year’s Giller Prize.
The reference to the “piglet-pink” flashlight and a later reference to a severed animal head are nods to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, another novel about a group of teenage boys — including one named Piggy — stranded on an island.
In Golding’s story, Piggy is the overweight, ostracized boy genius. In The Troop, that role is played by a character named Newton. Back home, Newton was the butt of jokes. As another of the boys, Max, comes to understand, “They had to turn
someone into that bottom rung of the ladder if only so they didn’t have to occupy it themselves.” But Newton’s bookish knowledge of the natural world will come in handy on the island, increasing his value in the eyes of his peers.
Even more disturbing than the man-eating worms in Cutter’s novel is a character named Shelley. A heartless sadist, Shelley has a predilection for the suffering of others — a predilection that grows on the island. The other boys sense Shelley is a malevolent oddball, but they have no idea of what he’s been up to in his spare time. Shelley is incapable of empathy, a fact he has been able to hide even from his doting mother: “He found that if you nodded — slowly, deeply, your chin almost touching your chest to indicate sincerity — people would think you shared their feelings. It was one of the many tricks he’d learned in order to blend in.”
Shelley is a sociopath who shows no remorse. Though his evil actions help propel Cutter’s story and increase its horror, Shelley’s depiction is the weak link in this novel. The boy’s actions, both past and present, read too much like a textbook case study.
As was the case in Lord of the Flies, Cutter’s characters represent a microcosm of the larger world. Shelley embodies evil, but there is also room on the island for decency, friendship and self-sacrifice. Even in a world without the supposedly civilizing influence of adults, some of the boys look out for each other despite the risk of contagion.
Of course, not all adults have a civilizing influence. It turns out to be an adult — one we never meet in person, but whom we get to know through newspaper reports and court transcripts included in this book — who is responsible for the infestation of man-eating worms on the island. This adult is motivated, as some are, by greed and self-interest. Perhaps even more discouragingly, he does not operate alone. Big business and the military are also implicated in his twisted scheme.
A riveting horror story, The Troop is also a meditation on death. Because Max’s father is an embalmer, the boy has already spent a great deal of time contemplating the subject. Looking out at the water that surrounds him, Max asks himself, “Would death be like that: endless liquid silence?”
What all the boys learn on the island is a lesson that generally comes much later in life: “All bodies fail. ... They fall to pieces in pieces, bit by torturous bit.”