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I just finished a Hell of an audiobook lately
Its name is The Troop, written by Nick Cutter, narrated by Corey Brill,
And it has proved one of the most intensive experiences with literary media in my entire life.
Listen… listen here as I try to contextualize that. I’m a person who enjoys doing chores while Wayne June’s voice serenades me with the writings of Lovecraft, Poe, and Red Hook Studios. I grew up on a Little Shop to John Carpenter’s The Thing horror pipeline. I’ve played I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream at least three times to myself by now.
There were points where I laughed my ass off. Points where I yelled either in cheer or anger. A point or two where I almost cried. Many points where I gagged, physically gagged several times while driving down the road because of Cutter’s linguistic assault. I took needed breaks off and on and yet I still kept coming back for more. It’s… where do I actually start? With that Stephen King review where he mentions that The Troop scared the hell out of him?? With this?
TL/DR: This shit makes “Lord of the Flies” look like an episode of Rugrats.
I picked up this story working on no more knowledge than what I suggest anyone else interested in the roller coaster experience also start from: This is a story about a handful of Boy Scouts encountering a very hungry, very sick guy in the woods while on a camping trip.
I was hoping for something like World War Z, which is a phenomenally written work by Max Brooks. This was not much like WWZ in content, but in terms of the quality, pacing, and amount of thought put into the writing itself, I can’t think of a better comparison. Every scene is tapestried with descriptions and immersive detail to make sure you understand the full pov of its characters. You will know exactly what they hear, what they smell, what they taste, in ways elating and in ways that will make you lose your appetite.
The themes themselves share more spiritually with… Kitty Horrorshow, if anything. I can’t elaborate much on that without spoilers, and I honestly don’t encourage a jump into this text any less blind than this.
All that said, this is a true disturbing work in the sense that it is sure as hell not going to be for everyone. I don’t think it’s really even for most people in its entirety. There are several scenes dedicated to the quite graphic portrayal of childhood bullying, body horror, parasites, violent harm done to animals domestic and not (extreme emphasis on this one), and the general etc. that comes with the territory of this being a horror novel with primarily 14 year olds as main characters. Be merry and be discretionary with this knowledge. I’m going to hope the nightmares about eating wallpaper and worms settle down as the days pass, as I still thank this book for adding them to my garden.
When life makes you this abnormal about the last audiobook you finished, I guess you make a tribute video/edit.
Content warnings: parasites, maggots, worms, body horror, blood, general disturbing audio and imagery
Spoiler warnings: The Troop, By Nick Cutter
The Troop, narrated by Corey Brill, mixed with a together mix of stock and film footage I cobbled together to the tune of Vessel’s “Red Sex”
Inspired by another video I saw putting the cognito ergo sum speech from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream to the same song. Making this made me squeamish and it doesn’t do the novel’s own ick factor even 4% of justice.
I don’t know how much new there even is to be said about the ending of Nick Cutter’s The Troop.
Yet the conclusion I’ve come to feels enough like a personal revelation to me.
Spoilers for a very nasty and great book, duh
It’s pure bitter with no sweet. It leaves more questions while answering very little. It’s left just open enough for people to even have this ongoing back and forth theorizing on what exactly happens to Max, or the worms. I didn’t find it unsatisfying though. There’s something of an inevitability to it. If anything, a last survivor feels almost optimistic at first, given how hard the novel had foreshadowed a grim death for the entire batch it started with. Feeling disappointed by the state we are left with by the end of that read would have been like being let down by the ending of “To Build a Fire”.
In fact, the so commonly held theory I hear that Max didn’t in fact make it off of the island uninfected feels most thematically consistent with all the build up we were given. The fearsome survivability of the pathogen, the scent in the air, and the dread of the book’s final sentences… and equally, and more to my leaning, was the idea that Max was left infected in a more allegorical sense- haunted by the trauma of the events for the rest of his life and the fear he will always inflict on those around him.
I think to myself though for the first time lately I’ve figured out the true despair of the ending as it was left this ambiguous: that the significance of whatever answer we come to about the end is… not much, really. Does it really matter if the boy was dead allegorically or literally following his return to the island? What we are all really even debating on was how much was left of any of the main cast after the dust had settled, and no matter how hard we pour over the possibilities, it’s just another flavor of “almost nothing”
The nature of the parasites were to core out and devour every form of life it touched, and leave nothing but a spreading emptiness in its wake. Its ending isn’t necessarily mysterious, it’s just that where we want to find the answers and the resolution, there is only emptiness. The Max we met from the first pages was as dead as his friends by the final few either way. The island is dead, either way. The community is scarred and pathologic and hurting their own, either way.
And all for, I guess, the greed of a few wicked men, the corruption of those in power, the ignorant compassion of a doctor, the naivety of unbridled kids… It’s a whole disgusting tragedy that honestly teaches you no new lessons of humans. That we are blundering and imperfect animals that doom our own and ourselves? That we’re resilient and can comfort each other and find hope even through the bleakest disasters?
Maybe that’s the real spirit at the heart of the ordeal. Though the disease in the book is a purely fictional, impossible creation, real disasters are so often equally as tragic, equally artificial, and the blame for them split to so many fractions it’s hard not to entertain them as a symptomatic expression for that which all humanity is infected with.
And maybe that sickness which feeds upon us and inhabits us is inevitable in a way, but I hardly think the book was aiming for a read this cynical. For all of the toothless threats Cutter gave about the worms’ rapid evolution, their appetite never did seem to make the final jump off of that island. Though there are teases here and there about a potentially dormant infection in Max, or the air of Falstaff, neither comes to fruition. Further on, Max even voluntarily returns to the blighted origin, separating himself and his ripples from the community that shunned him.
And just maybe, in thinking about Max again, I have found some solemn grain of sugar in this outcome after all.
To my interest there’s a unique context around the way death is treated in The Troop. Dying is written as a drawn out and spectacularly agonizing, cruel, and horrific event; however, death for almost all of the characters and animals in whole book is portrayed as contrastingly merciful. With Kent’s death, Tim’s death, Newton’s death, the chimp’s death, I’m only left with a breath of relief if anything. These were terminal beings you watched suffer for chapter after chapter knowing there was a dwindlingly impossible chance of being saved. Multiple times you almost want to yell “oh my god, just put me out of that poor thing’s misery already!”
Ephraim’s own was actually terrifying and more avoidable, but at the actions of a dying Shelley, who, even if you have nothing but hatred for, still passed with a finality that just screams “thank god that’s over” for anyone in witness to his final game. You know that once he was gone, he had taken his last victims. What I’m saying is that maybe there is a similar peace somewhere in the fate of Max.
The deranged doctor told that the worms would be the final living things alive even after the wake of the apocalypse, but where there are no cockroaches, there will be no guts for those worms to nest. Parasites by definition live by the hosts they pursue, and Falstaff is now the resting place of those the worms called theirs. In Max’s return, in his death, spiritual, physical, whatever it may be, there is resolution in knowing that the memories and trauma of that emptiness will rest with him on that scorched rock. There is finality in knowing that the mainland dodged the bullet of wider outbreak and that, while the scars will linger, the infection has been survived by the more adaptable, more resilient organism that nursed it.