The Troop

I'm really torn between 4 and 5 stars.

This was a terrifying book. Terrifying in the most primal way. The fear it builds does not come from a wicked beast or something paranormal, it comes from something that's all to real and can't be fought: a virus inside you.

The writing style really felt like a Stephen King book, with its background character development and interviews and case file parts (which was on purpose, as the author acknowledges). That said I really loved it.

The transition from innocent childhood where the adults handle everything, to the sad truth that adults are sometimes as lost as children, was really well done. Every kid had its own fleshed out character and took a reasonable part in the story.

The gory and disgusting “action” parts were evenly spaced out and believable.

But it's also a sad book. There's nothing good happening to any of the characters. All they got left are memories of better times, on which they cling on while going through hell. It doesn't have a happy ending, which I really like. Life isn't like the fairy tales.

So why not 5 stars? Because all the animal cruelty left a bitter taste in my mouth. I know that it WAS there to do just that, and for a few characters those scenes were crucial, but it was a bit too fleshed out for my tastes. Like the author really had fun writing sites full of those stuff.

Yes yes, I know that drawing the line on animal cruelty in a book where kids slaughter themselves is weird, but that's just how I roll. I can't help it.

I flew through this book and wanted to know what was going to happen to the boys next. The writing is pretty graphic, so if reading about wounds and blood and the like is going to make you put this book down, don't pick it up. I usually can't handle reading about these things, but because the book moves so quickly, the author doesn't linger on these scenes for too long and I was fine. The horror is definitely something you could see happening in real life which makes it that much more horrifying.

My issues were that the characters were all stereotypes. The troop leader is a single, adult man who lives alone with rumors in town that he might be gay. There is the fat, nerdy kid who you root for. There is the dumb jock whose dad is the chief of police and you want to grow out of this bullying phase. We have the angry kid whose dad is in jail. We have the normal kid with no stand-out characteristics. And very early on, we are clued into the fact that one of the boys is a socio/psychopath who likes to torture animals and is definitely going to be a problem as the boys try to survive the horror of the island.

Putting all these flat characters together just left me wanting to know how those that didn't survive the island died. I didn't really care who survived and who died, just how they did it. That was the most interesting part. I also felt like they didn't speak like 13 and 14-year old boys actually speak which didn't help my connection to the characters.

I still think this is a good book to read if you like “gross”, realistic horror, but I wish the characters had been fully developed.

I'm honestly not sure why I kept reading after the cat scene, the point where I went from generally bored to disgusted, maybe it was the writing for the first few pages that I really liked or maybe it was just the desire to not DNF 2 books in the same week?
There are actual horror aspects to this book and the prose is nice but that's about all the redeeming value I can find here in the face of the unnecessary amount of just gross. I'm not a generally squeamish person but it all felt very gratuitous here. I think the sexual aspects of the book were just the worst, realistically speaking I know young teens experience arousal and whatnot but there's something particularly uncomfortable about the way it is approached here. The best way I can describe it is this book felt like horror in the same way as A Serbian Film did but in a way it did feel more gratuitous than A Serbian Film did and part of me hopes that the gratuitous nature of it all was somehow the point and the true horror of the story.

The Troop is the first book of Nick Cutter's that I have ever picked up and I can now happily say it won't be the last.

This gave me everything that I could possibly need for a great horror novel. It was tense, gory and had me squirming. When I say squirming, that is an understatement but it's the best way to explain how I felt without spoiling anything.

The characters were also fantastically written and they each brought something unique to the story. Some had me rooting for them, some had me hoping they would be the next victim... I had great fun and I was on the edge of my seat from the very first chapter.

And the ending?? THE ENDING??

I want to give a quick shoutout to Alli for inspiring me to pick this up. I always trust your judgement and this didn't steer me wrong.

I would recommend looking up the trigger and content warnings for this book if you're going to decide to pick it up.

I can't wait to check out more by this author!

While I certainly love horror and this book packs in some of the best chilling scenes and descriptions. I have realized that maybe body horror isn't my thing after reading this. I was constantly plagued by itchiness and creeped out the whole time.

Much of this book I just found to be gross. Mostly because Cutter describes everything so vividly that I found myself having to put the book down a lot. Also maybe not the best choice of books to read during a pandemic.

Somehow, this title keeps jumping onto the “read”-shelf, whenever I try to put in onto the “Did not finish”-shelf.

Admittedly, I'm very close to finishing it, but I haven't been reading in it for a loooooooong time, so would probably have to go back a bit to remember some of the story and that ain't gonna happen.

It started out promisingly enough with weird going-ons interspersed with interviews and articles about what happened before the unfortunate group ended up on the remote island.
But quickly I felt that it was the same over and over again. I didn't mind the gore at all, some of it actually got under my skin (no pun intended), I didn't even mind the animal cruelty, animal lover as I am, as it's just fiction. But I had a hard time getting invested in the characters and - quite frankly - telling them apart.
Also, I found myself not caring about who lived or died or if ANY of them lived (which some of the “flashforward” interviews suggest that at least one does). For a story to work you have to have someone to root for. This is the same reason I didn't like Hostel, because the main characters were all jack-asses.

It's a rare thing for me to not finish a book, but I will give the rest of this one a pass.
Maybe, someday, when I'm hard-pressed for reading material, I will finish it.

this is not scary nor disturbing, it's just gross.
pretty much all the characters (even the author at this point) are sexist, macho and homophobic
the fuck with the animal torture ? is it a unfulfilled phantasm for the author, so he wrote a book to be appease ?
what's the point ? do you guys, have enjoyment reading a book that grossed you out ?
absolutely not.
I can't read anymore books by male authors writing about violence, just for the fact to be violent and they're disgusting misogynistic thinking. Go to therapy man.