The Troop: Lord of the Flies Meets Body Horror

Let me be clear from the start: The Troop is not for the faint of heart. Nick Cutter has written a novel of extreme body horror that earns comparisons to early Clive Barker and Richard Laymon. If descriptions of biological nightmare fuel make you queasy, this is not your book.

For everyone else: The Troop is a relentlessly effective horror novel that takes the Lord of the Flies framework and adds a parasitic organism designed to make its hosts consume everything in sight—including themselves. When a stranger carrying this bioweapon arrives at a remote island camping trip, five Boy Scouts and their Scoutmaster face a nightmare that tests every limit.

Cutter intercuts the main narrative with news reports, scientific transcripts, and testimony that gradually reveals the scope of the outbreak. This documentary framing adds dread—we know from the start that things will go horribly wrong, but the details are parceled out with cruel precision.

The five scouts are well-drawn types: the bully, the brain, the everyman, the sensitive one, and the psychopath. Yes, one of them was already broken before the creature arrived, and watching his darker impulses find expression is as disturbing as any monster.

The Troop won't be for everyone—it's too extreme, too uncompromising, too willing to visit horrors on its young cast. But for readers who can handle it, it's an unforgettable experience.