Okay, it’s true, I’ve got worms on the brain. I recently read The Troop by Nick Cutter, and, well, anyone who’s read the book will probably understand why. I read the book based on positive reviews and conversation in some Facebook group or another- probably Books of Horror- and I picked it up at an airport while I was flying off somewhere or another for purposes which, for reasons of eldritch origin, I won’t get into here.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really know what I was getting into; I’d managed to avoid spoilers, and reading the back of the book gave me more of a zombie kind of vibe than anything else. Cool, I thought, a Boy Scout troop fighting zombies, becoming zombies, eating each other.
And, well, suffice it to say, I was way off in a lot of ways. But strangely, I also wasn’t TOO far off. Nick Cutter took the classic zombie tropes and twisted them into a refreshing blend of body horror, sci-fi, and government conspiracy.
If you hadn’t gathered by now, this article is likely to be filled with spoilers, so, before I get any further, let me recommend that you go and read this book, because it’s a good one, especially for fans of body horror, Lord of the Flies, and conspiracy theories. Anyway, spoilers and full analysis commencing below.
For a look at a different kind of unsettling horror, see our analysis of Creep!
The Troop vs Isolation
Nick Cutter sets the stage for the ensuing horror on an island in a bay, large enough to explore, but uninhabited, with only one structure, a cabin. This island offers various types of terrain, from rocky cliffs to dark caves, salty beaches to thick woods. The purpose, the troop leader explains, is to simulate a true survival scenario, and so there will be no contact with the mainland until the weekend is over, and only then will the Boy Scout troop have earned their merit badges.
They have the food they brought with them, and they have their camping supplies. They do have a radio they can use to contact the mainland in an absolute emergency, but they are otherwise left without the comforts of technology or society. They have no one to turn to if things go awry. And, of course, things go awry.
What was intended to simulate a survival scenario becomes an actual survival scenario, but not one for which any Boy Scout manual could have prepared the troop. What begins as a boring, run-of-the-mill Boy Scout field trip quickly transforms when the group is beset by a strange intruder. Unbeknownst to the group, the boat they arrived on has had its main battery removed, rendering it effectively useless.
Suddenly, the group has to rely on whatever knowledge they have in order to overcome a storm, a biological enemy that has never been seen before, and their own doubts, fears, and urges. Even worse, before long, they lose their scout master, Tim, who, as the adult, was relied upon to have the wisdom and knowledge to lead them out of this situation. Tim is also a local doctor, and thus is trained in medicine. He hopes that his expertise will help them, but arguably, his expertise coupled with his curiosity end up making matters much worse.
There are several moments where it looks like the troop might receive help from outside forces- helicopters flying by, boats on the water in the distance- but unfortunately, they aren’t being helped so much as they are being watched, monitored, and kept away from everyone else. You see, the troop, through no fault of their own, has been exposed to a dangerous animal the likes of which cannot be controlled and could devastate the world in a very short span of time.
So, five boys are left to make their way through a situation in which isolation is enforced, and no help is expected to arrive. If anything, those that watch the boys have already accepted their death.
The Troop vs Nature
I mentioned a dangerous animal earlier, but I don’t want to mislead you into thinking the animal is natural- far from it. While it may be based in nature, it has been experimented on and genetically altered, making it unnatural, almost supernatural.
That said, the members of the boy scout troop are nonetheless under the thumb of nature throughout the book. They are trapped on an island, with a very limited supply of food. On the island, which is uninhabited other than a small cabin, is a variety of geographical features- clearings, cliffs, beaches- and animals. The boys have few encounters with these animals, other than, when starvation rears its ugly head, two boys find a turtle that they hope to kill and eat.
This moment serves as a fascinating juxtaposition between the infected and the uninfected. The infected will eat anything, living or dead, without a thought as to preparation. The uninfected boys try to kill the turtle, concerned with doing so as painlessly as possible. While they fail in this regard, their reaction serves as a testament to their humanity, a humanity that the infected are completely lacking, obsessed only with feeding their hunger.
The boys remain hungry, unable to bring themselves to eat the turtle whose suffering they caused. Hunger, a natural experience of all living things, is an obstacle for everyone in the story.
However, while the hunger takes the main stage of this book, lurking in the background is the threat of a major rainstorm. It’s so strong that the boys must hunker down in the cabin with their dead scout master and the dead patient-zero. When the cabin collapses, suddenly, there is no safe haven on the island. The boys have to seek out caves or build their own rudimentary shelter from memory.
But regardless of nature’s plans, it is a man-made threat that is the greatest of all.
The Troop vs The Worms
I mentioned before that I had come into this book expecting a zombie story, and Nick Cutter’s monsters do check a lot of those zombie boxes: voracious appetite for anything, including human flesh (although, admittedly, zombies tend to focus only on meat, often specifically human brains); dead-like appearance (although zombies are typically the living dead and the infected in Cutter’s novel are alive and wasting away into skeletons of themselves); an ability to infect others, including through direct bites (although that’s typically necessary for zombies, and not really necessary for The Troop).
See, this is the thing that made The Troop so interesting to me; the book functions as a deconstruction and reimagining of zombie tropes, while utilizing what feels like grounded, reality-based science and rationale to explain the horrors of what happens when man plays god.
In this instance, a scientist named Dr. Edgerton has been experimenting with a kind of tapeworm, with the intention of controlling the tapeworm to allow for rapid weightloss once infected by the worms. Once the ideal weight had been achieved, the idea was for a second pill to be taken that would kill the worms. However, in the absence of that second pill, the worms are left to do what they do best: eat.
It’s eventually explained that the worms are able to bond to a section of the brain and drive a person to eat more, uncontrollably, without thinking, regardless of if the thing they are trying to eat is traditionally considered edible. Throughout the book, as characters lose their minds, we see them trying to consume couch cushions, springs, wood, rocks… anything and everything that can be broken down and swallowed.
Eventually, the worms begin to consume the body of the host; this is what leads to the zombie appearances of the infected. Their skin begins to hang loosely on their bones, as their muscle, fat, and organs get eaten away. Add to this the uncontrollable urge to consume, which leads the infected to attack other individuals, and you have a great pseudozombie: still alive, but looking very much dead and driven to eat whatever it can get its hands on.
Check out what we have to say about fear!
Of course, a big part of zombie lore is the ability of the zombie to reproduce the zombie virus/effects in others. The worms of The Troop do not leave anything to be desired in this regard. The worms, nearly microscopic, are able to survive in the air, in the water, on the ground, for several minutes as they search for new hosts. In the instance that one is bitten by the infected, the worms that have infected the host’s mouth will enter into the blood stream of the person that was attacked.
We get several vivid descriptions of the worms crawling and twisting over each other, wriggling in saliva. We get a moment of the worms swimming through the water until they are all over a person, puncturing his skin and traveling up his urethra. The worms are so small, they can’t be seen or avoided. Truly, surviving the worms requires a great deal of luck- once one is infected, it’s game over.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the worms is the hunger that they cause in the boys. Suddenly, one of the most basic feelings, a bodily communication of survival, is called into question. Are the boys experiencing normal hunger, brought on from days of not eating? Or are they experiencing the unnatural hunger brought on from infection?
For the troop, caught under these circumstances, it’s impossible to know for sure, until it’s far too late.
The Troop vs The Government
The boys are absolutely stuck on the island. It has been entirely quarantined by the government. No one can get to it, and because of the state of the only boat on the island, no one can get off.
We see military choppers and ships surrounding the island, watching for any sign of break-out or infiltration. When two of the boys’ parents try to steal a boat and rescue their sons, their boat is shot, sunk, and the fathers taken into custody by the military. Towards the end of the story, we also see one of the boys get shot down by the military.
This is because the military is not only aware of the need to quarantine the area due to a biological outbreak, but they also had a strong hand in developing the weapon. What had been intended as a purely cosmetic product, manipulating, directing, and controlling the growth and appetites and lives of tapeworms was instead recognized by the government for its potential to infect and disrupt enemy encampments, effectively allowing an oppositional force to destroy themselves without any need for guns, missiles, drones, or bombs. A small sample could theoretically be released into an enemy water supply, and within days, the enemy’s troops would decimate themselves out of uncontrollable hunger.
The test proves a success, and while the military attempts to feign innocence in the affair, it is quickly proven that the military was testing these tapeworms for use as a weapon, and that the military orchestrated the escape of patient zero, directed him towards the island, and prepared to observe what happened afterwards. The boys, their scoutmaster, and anything on the island and in the surrounding waters were simply collateral damage. Any survivors would be studied to determine why they survived: did their immune system fight off the invading worms? Are the worms laying dormant? Did any survivors manage to evade the danger the worms posed?
It is a question that goes mostly unanswered, although there are hints that perhaps the sole survivor is enjoying a merely temporary respite from the horrors the tapeworms cause. Although, the argument could be made that the only survivor was continuously used as a test subject. In the end, he returns to the island where he witnessed so much death and horror, stating that he feels within him a deep hunger.
It is my personal interpretation that the worms, whether they were lying dormant or were reintroduced to Max during the course of his post-incident study, have become active within Max, and his desire to return to the island is less one of existential depression, and more one of recognition and self-sacrifice.
But that is, admittedly, my interpretation, and while there is textual evidence to support it, there is plenty of reason to interpret the ending differently.
The Troop vs Themselves
The worms are frightening, but they are also predictable and can be avoided by getting far enough away from them. They aren’t intended to survive for long outside of a host, and so, if you can avoid direct contact, then you should be able to remain uninfected.
The real horror of the story, outside of the body horror offered by the worms, is found in the boy scouts themselves. Anyone who has read The Lord of the Flies will recognize its influence on the book (I was grateful to Nick Cutter for including a section at the end of the book explaining his influences, and including William Golding’s classic novel as one of them. “Piggy” from LOTF is analogized in Newt in The Troop, and both deal with teenage boys trying to survive each other on a desolate island).
However, it isn’t simply in watching a miniature society turn against itself and crumble that we find horror; if that were the case, then Lord of the Flies would be categorized as a horror novel, and while it has its share of disturbing moments and imagery, labeling it as a “horror” novel seems disingenuous.
No, the horror of The Troop comes from one of the boys, Shelley, who serves as the active antagonist of the novel. Fans of Stephen King will immediately recognize shades of some of his most despicable characters, and that’s not by coincidence. Patrick Hockstetter from Stephen King’s It was a major influence on Nick Cutter when designing the character of Shelley. Much like Patrick Hockstetter, Shelley is the kind of character that might best be described as sociopathic. His presence puts others on edge. The other boys in the troop are comfortable enough just labeling Shelley as “weird” and leaving him to himself. As long as he isn’t bothering them, they won’t bother him. This creates an isolating existence for Shelley, who recognizes that he doesn’t fit in, but is okay with it, as it leaves him to pursue his own interests unimpeded by judgment.
Unfortunately, most of those interests are sadistic, involving torturing animals, observing them in their moments of pain, agony, and eventually death. It is worth noting that, for Shelley, death is not the goal. Rather, death ends his playtime. The true joy for Shelley comes from the pain he is causing, and from observing the way different animals writhe in pain and come to accept the inevitability of their death. This morbid curiosity is eventually turned on his troopmates, as he tortures both Ephraim and Kent, the de facto leader of the troop in the absence of adults.
With Ephraim, Shelley’s cruelty is more psychological than physical. Shelley plants the idea in Ephraim’s head that a worm wiggled its way into his body, and that Shelley saw it for a moment before it squiggled too deep to see. The thought drives Ephraim crazy. Though he feels normal hunger, he becomes convinced that he is infected. By the prodding of Shelley, he begins to believe he can carve the worm out of him. So he takes his knife and starts cutting himself up. Eventually, Shelley comes across him and carves Ephraim up himself. When that stops being fun, he convinces Ephraim to light himself on fire to burn the worms out.
Kent, on the other hand, Shelley chooses to assert a more physical dominance over. When the scoutmaster, Tim, admitted that he was infected, Kent led the rest of the troop in a mutiny, locking the infected scoutmaster in a closet to protect themselves. Kent, in a show of bravado and authority, takes a drink of whiskey straight from a bottle that the scoutmaster, Tim, had been drinking from. Without the knowledge or forethought that whatever Tim has might be contagious, this action is Kent’s attempt at showing off to the other boy scouts, proving that he is capable of drinking whiskey like an adult, capable of overpowering an adult, and capable of leading the troop to safety. Suffice it to say, Kent is very wrong in his beliefs.
What is horror, anyway? Find out here!
It isn’t long before Kent is infected, reduced from a large football linebacker type to a weak, starving corpse of a person, begging Shelley to show the mercy of providing anything — anything — for him to eat. This means wood. It means his own fingernails. It means dead bugs. It means the massive snakelike corpse of one of the tapeworms.
Eventually, Shelley grows tired of toying with Kent and decides to lead Kent to the water, where Kent is too weak to fight against Shelley, who drowns him. It is at this moment that Shelley becomes infected: the worms wriggle out of the dying Kent and through the water to Shelly.
Shelley, unlike the others, embraces the worms inside of him. It is his transformation that is perhaps the most horrifying; while the other infected folks are a danger, it is clear that they are motivated by hunger, and recognize how terrible their condition is. Kent whimpers while he eats bugs and tapeworms. He sees how he has become a shell of himself.
Shelley, on the other hand, begins to see himself as something of a divine being, selected by what he sees as the god-like worms to carry their babies and ensure that they are able to continue to procreate in others. His description is much more akin to a zombie, and his internal monologue tells us just how ready and willing he is to do whatever he wants to harm his fellow scouts. At this point, he knows that there is no real consequence to his behavior; he will die at the behest of the worms, and he’s excited to take the rest of his troop with him. In fact, it seems like just the kind of experience he’s been waiting for his whole life, as killing and causing pain has always had an erotic effect on him.
Conclusions
The Troop does a fantastic job of blending various conflicts into one cohesive narrative, presenting several every-day horrors in their most extreme. While the mutated tapeworms might not present themselves in the giant manner we see in Bram Stoker’s White Worm or in the Graboids from the Tremors franchise, they pose a much more existential threat and are much harder to stop.
By utilizing these creatures, Nick Cutter has weaved a plot that reinvents the zombie genre, criticizes government and military experimentation, and highlights what can happen when natural disasters are taken to an extreme. They say that when it rains, it pours, and in this book, as in real life, when the storm hits, that’s when the worms come wriggling out.
For fans of body horror, this book cannot be missed. I personally hope that it is adapted to a film sooner than later, as its isolated environment and small cast make for a perfectly creepy tale that will leave you squirming for days.
Perhaps you’ll even start to question your own hunger, one of the basest human needs.
Stay Shocked,
Z