Nick Cutter is a pseudonym for a Canadian author, Craig Davidson, who's garnered acclaim under three different names, but it seems to be the one people gravitate to. This was Davidson's debut as Cutter, but he followed it up a year later with 'The Deep', which I've seen mentioned almost as often. Not realising that he was Canadian, I assumed the title referred to a shortened American version of "trooper", meaning "soldier", maybe even a whole bunch of them, presumably causing havoc on the island in the cover art. It turns out to refer to a troop of boy scouts, but please don't let that make you think that it's tame in the slightest.

The cover quote is Stephen King talking up how it's "old-school horror at its best". Initially, that's old school Stephen King style horror, because the only two adults who could be described as major characters are sidelined and so the story falls to the five scouts in Troop 52, who are young teens. I'm still convinced that what King does best is to explore the coming of age of young teens and so this plays quickly and emphatically into that approach, even though we don't expect any of them to get much older. However, as it grows, it moves more into old school 'Paperbacks from Hell' pulp novel in the British tradition, explaining why it won the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing, beating another lauded debut, Josh Malerman's 'Bird Box'.

It starts wonderfully. A news item from the Weird News Network is horrific and surreal and likely as untrustworthy as the network name, but we soon find that it's true. An emaciated man eats a Prince Edward Island diner out of eggs and then steals a boat. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but, crucially, he's still hungry, even with his stomach lining bursting from the sheer volume of food he consumed. He takes the boat to Flagstaff Island, an unpopulated island with a circumference of a mere ten kilometres, because he's been followed.

Now, unpopulated doesn't mean that there's nobody there, just that they don't stay there. Right now, Tim Riggs, both doctor and scoutmaster in North Point, has just moved into the one and only building on the island with the five boys under his charge. They're easy to delineate even in their earliest scenes: Kent Jenks is the jock of the group, enhanced by being the police chief's son. Max Kirkwood and Ephraim Elliott have been best friends since they were born and fight like brothers. Shelley Longpre is a budding psychopath. And Newt Thornton is the nerd of the group, easily the most serious about the scouting part of being in a troop.

Tim takes that troop up there every year for a camping holiday. The plan is only to spend a couple of days before the boat returns to pick them up. It won't come, of course, because once the powers-that-be realise that the emaciated man, who we soon learn is named Thomas Padgett, has made it to the island, the army quarantines it. They refuse to let anyone in or out and they have orders to shoot if need be. After the radio gets broken by the hungry man, these seven are truly isolated and have to figure out how to survive on their own.

Of course, Scoutmaster Tim would be a great leader for a situation like this but he's also a doctor, so he attempts to treat the visitor. Padgett is clearly severely ill and might not live without quick intervention. After an examination, he even operates, using Max as his assistant because he's the son of the funeral director in North Point and has done some taxidermy. Unfortunately for them all, whatever Padgett has is communicable and, after they cut out a three foot worm, he dies and Tim loses twenty pounds in a day. Now he's the hungry man and Kent locks him in the utility closet to keep themselves safe.

Given that we're still pretty early in the book, it's pretty safe to assume that they're not close to being as safe as they think they are and much of the rest of the novel explores how that plays out. While we watch the kids splinter and reunite and suffer under Shelley's twisted games, in a more overtly horror take on 'Lord of the Flies' in miniature, a comparison so obvious that Cutter claims it with a quote from that book before page one, we also learn some background they don't know, about how this all came about.

This is neat because it highlights how there are really two horror stories here. One is the survival horror that the kids are going through, complicated at most turns by Shelley Longpre. I had quite a lot of fun trying to figure out who would survive, if anyone. Kent is the one physically built for it but Newt has the knowledge, Eef and Max have the teamwork and Shelley... well, Shelley can do a lot of things that the rest couldn't and wouldn't. That's not typically a good thing, but it could be in a situation like this. Needless to say, my first guess was wrong and so was my second.

I don't want to dig too far into the background that led to Padgett becoming the hungry man but it's a very different horror story. Let's just say that it's mad science and it's corporate corruption and it's military amorality and its horror is as brutal in its ramifications as the horror the five kids go through on the island is icky and disgusting and psychopathic. Combining the two into a single narrative structure is a touch of genius from Cutter and perhaps its biggest success. It's this until it's that. However, it's still this and it's getting ickier! Ah, but it's also still that and wow, that's an inhuman twist! OK, it's both, goddammit, and they're equally impactful in their way.

I liked this one a lot. It's a smooth, quick read, but it's patient, characterful and increasingly deep. It wasn't hard to see where some of it was going but other aspects kept on adding layers beyond a basic expectation we might have had. The people who won't like this are the ones who can't watch horror movies without checking DoesTheDogDie.com first. To be honest, I can't remember if a dog dies here or not, but a lot of animals do. Some of the animal cruelty isn't meant and deepens and saddens situations. For instance, Max and Newt feel awful about how long it takes the turtle they plan to eat to die, so much so that they bury it instead of eating it. If Shelley's involved, though, it was absolutely meant because that's who he is, and he escalates from there.

It's yet another Books of Horror Go To List pick that I'd highly recommend, but it's hard to say who would enjoy it most. It starts out like Stephen King fans would dig it but then shifts into a teasing cross between a literary horror epic and a Hamlyn nasty novel, as if William Golding co-wrote with  John Halkin. Of course, fans of all three of those will adore it most, however few of us there are in reality. And now I need to read 'The Deep'. ~~ Hal C F Astell