Two facts recommended The Troop to me: that Stephen King is quoted on the cover as saying that the book "scared the hell" out of him and that it is set in the comically small Canadian province of PEI (where I was born, and other than Anne of Green Gables -- which I'm not 100% certain I ever even finished -- I've never read a book set in that red-dirted land of lobster fishermen, potato farmers, and my own Irish-immigrant ancestors).
I got a real Stephen King vibe right from the beginning with the tale of the mysterious "hungry man": a scarecrow-like figure who appears at a diner, and after scarfing down five huge breakfast platters, continues to stuff paper napkins into his mouth, unable to sate his urgent appetite. Meanwhile, a Scoutmaster arrives on deserted Falstaff Island, a tiny dot of land just off the coast of PEI, and settles his troop of five 14-year-old boys down for the night in the island's lone cabin. Cue the hungry man, now skipping over the waves in a stolen boat, driven forward by unknown forces. The Scoutmaster turns on the porchlight as he enjoys a glass of scotch. The hungry man's eyes fixate on the weak light coming from a nearby spit of land, like a beacon, and he is drawn towards the light; the island; the Troop.
What follows is more medical horror than monster horror -- although monstrous events certainly occur -- with the root cause being:
I enjoyed that the structure of the book added the transcripts of a later hearing, newspaper articles, and archived research documents to the straight narrative (a format that the author acknowledges in an Afterword was "borrowed" from Stephen King's own Carrie), and the writing itself is strong and descriptive, with just enough foreshadowing and bombshells to ratchet up the tension. Speaking of the author, Nick Cutter, it is apparently the pseudonym of an "acclaimed author of novels and short stories". And on an unrelated topic, author Craig Davidson had this to say about The Troop:
Masterpiece. The word has been thrown around pretty loosely the last little while — and by “last little while,” I mean more accurately, the last thousand or so years. Michelangelo’s David. Masterpiece. War and Peace. Masterpiece. Citizen Kane. Masterpiece. The term has been trivialized—so much so that when a true masterpiece arrives, one that puts to shame all those prior saccharine and weak-willed efforts, it requires a new term.I can't possibly improve upon that review. And I'm thinking this is what Ken is getting for his upcoming birthday -- he has spent more time living in PEI than I have and he could probably tell me if some of the "local flavour" stuff sounds more right to him than it does to me.
Genius. Another woefully overused term. Stephen Hawking. Leonardo da Vinci. Mozart. Genius, genius, genius. And yes, they are geniuses—but when someone comes along who out-geniuses them all, making them look like babbling infants in comparison … what do we call this man? How can we properly quantify his gift in comparison to these other rank muddlers?
There is only one word that suits: Mastergenius.
And so it is this term that I apply to Mr. Nick Cutter and his flawless novel, The Troop. Were it a diamond, its worth would be incalculable! And yet, this new term still fails to convey just how enormously talented, how skyscraping and peerless a scribe is Mr. Cutter. It is as if God himself communed with Cutter during the writing of this novel, guiding Cutter’s pen with His holy hand.
Childhood bonding? Bucolic surroundings described with a deftness heretofore unseen? Uh … little bitty hungry critters?
This novel’s got it all!
Please trust that I am not indulging in hyperbole. Upon reading this novel I broke all my fingers so that I couldn’t type another word of my own (save this review): It taught me the folly of my own writing ambitions. Compared to Mr. Cutter, my scribblings are naught but the mindless doodles of a toddler on a sheet of tattered foolscap.
Read. Be amazed. The Troop. The work of a Mastergenius!
And here's my own scary PEI story: When I was 12, we went down to PEI from Ontario to visit my mother's family -- a big family reunion. We spent one afternoon at the beach, and as day turned to night, we had a huge driftwood bonfire where we roasted the oysters that some knowledgeable relatives had spent the time harvesting (and I still remember how fresh and delicious they were). As darkness fell, my Uncle Eric started telling ghost stories; the sort of strange but true tales that Island folk seem to know; more eerie than frightful, and we kids were truly creeped out.
One story was about some young man who had hanged himself -- the victim of a broken heart -- and as my uncle described the loneliness that the man felt, he added, "But I guess kids like you don't know real loneliness. Coming from cities, you have no idea of what darkness is or what isolation is or...hey! I could show you!"
Eric then got all us cousins (ages about 10-14) to sit in the open box of his pickup and he carefully started driving away from the beach; away from the fire and our parents. He had the little window open from the truck's cab and he continued to tell us spooky stories about every road and corner we passed, and eventually, he got to the area where he said the young man had hanged himself. As he slowed down he said, "I'm just going to turn off the headlights for a minute so you can see what true darkness looks like. The tree where he hanged himself is just up ahead. That huge one that bends over the road." Now, it was crazy enough for us to be riding in the back of a pickup truck (you can't do that where we came from) but once he turned out his lights, he was right; the dark was more complete than anything I had ever known; utterly alien.
He continued, slowly, driving and talking about this tortured young soul and warned us that his spirit still roamed the area on dark and quiet nights like this one. As he kept talking, and driving, and nearing the big, overhanging tree, I assure you that we kids were all peeing our pants in the box of the truck, and as we passed under the tree, the branches reaching out like spindly fingers, there was suddenly a thump on the roof and a solid body jumped into the back of the truck with us. Cue the screams.
As soon as Eric pulled forward just a bit, we could see that a scarecrow-like dummy had been strung up from the tree and marvelled at the planning and preparation that Eric had put into his prank. But, aha, the joke was on him as he soon discovered: at some point in the hours when we were at the beach, someone had stolen Eric's good workboots off the dummy. (And Eric found this thievery to be unbelievable since, apparently, the dummy in this tree was a well-known Island tradition -- what's the world coming to if you can't leave your good workboots on a dummy hanging from a tree on an isolated country road?)
This experience of complete dark and isolation has, naturally, stayed with me, and no doubt, framed at least part of my enjoyment of The Troop.
