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A review by woolfian
The Troop by Nick Cutter
Did not finish book. Stopped at 60%.
This was a book that popped up on my reading app and I figured “why not?” I went in knowing nothing beyond the description.
I stopped reading at about 60% at which point one of the characters graphically tortures and murders a kitten. I don’t mind reading difficult books about difficult people, but I don’t like reading books that have cruelty for the sake of cruelty with effectively zero character development, which is basically what this was. Even without this, I would have rated the book low for the following reasons.
There's a fine line between being descriptive enough to convey a rich mental image and being so packed with metaphor it becomes distracting. I found Cutter's writing to fall solidly in the latter camp. Every other sentence was a metaphor, and I’d be rich if I had a dollar every time he wrote something akin to "He saw a thing, which reminded him of this thing he saw as a boy" or "He saw a thing, which resembled this other thing that seems unrelated but really isn't.” We get it, Cutter likes description.
But description doesn’t really matter if it isn’t balanced by a strong storyline, which I just didn’t see here. A bunch of mad scientists use worms to create a weight loss medication and release a body-hijacking parasite onto an unsuspecting small town (sorry, remote island). It’s not even unique. It’s like Cutter heard the urban legends about people eating tapeworms to lose weight and was like “I can make a story around that.” And he did, but not a good one.
Throughout the book I kept fighting the feeling that this was basically just an attempt to be like Steven King, and that's probably not fair. But there were lots of similarities--body-hijacking parasites, the ragtag cast of teen characters with shitty parents throwing taunts and jabs, the overly descriptive tone, toeing the line of body horror.....it would be nice to see a book like this that was more stylistically removed from King.
So in the end, I would have given this 1.5/5 stars because it lacked originality, had a weak story that that it tried to mask under an endless stream of heavy description and predictable teenage banter, and had almost farcical “scientific” interludes (as a scientist, these gave me a good chuckle, so I threw Cutter an extra 0.5 stars).
I stopped reading at about 60% at which point one of the characters graphically tortures and murders a kitten. I don’t mind reading difficult books about difficult people, but I don’t like reading books that have cruelty for the sake of cruelty with effectively zero character development, which is basically what this was. Even without this, I would have rated the book low for the following reasons.
There's a fine line between being descriptive enough to convey a rich mental image and being so packed with metaphor it becomes distracting. I found Cutter's writing to fall solidly in the latter camp. Every other sentence was a metaphor, and I’d be rich if I had a dollar every time he wrote something akin to "He saw a thing, which reminded him of this thing he saw as a boy" or "He saw a thing, which resembled this other thing that seems unrelated but really isn't.” We get it, Cutter likes description.
But description doesn’t really matter if it isn’t balanced by a strong storyline, which I just didn’t see here. A bunch of mad scientists use worms to create a weight loss medication and release a body-hijacking parasite onto an unsuspecting small town (sorry, remote island). It’s not even unique. It’s like Cutter heard the urban legends about people eating tapeworms to lose weight and was like “I can make a story around that.” And he did, but not a good one.
Throughout the book I kept fighting the feeling that this was basically just an attempt to be like Steven King, and that's probably not fair. But there were lots of similarities--body-hijacking parasites, the ragtag cast of teen characters with shitty parents throwing taunts and jabs, the overly descriptive tone, toeing the line of body horror.....it would be nice to see a book like this that was more stylistically removed from King.
So in the end, I would have given this 1.5/5 stars because it lacked originality, had a weak story that that it tried to mask under an endless stream of heavy description and predictable teenage banter, and had almost farcical “scientific” interludes (as a scientist, these gave me a good chuckle, so I threw Cutter an extra 0.5 stars).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Child abuse, Animal death, and Animal cruelty