One creepy character says, 'bad things happen to good people, bad people die happy in their beds.' As in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the boys show us what they are made of through their choices.

Cutter plays with this convention in the best of ways by messing with a clear-cut sense of right and wrong. The order in which the characters are killed, and how they are finished off, is often the way the author sends a moral message.

For the troop, that perk is soon gone.Ī horror story often holds suspense by killing off a group one by one. As one of the boys observes, one of the good things about being a kid is that you can abandon anything with no real repercussions. When he discovers the source of the man's hunger, it is to late to stop the spread of the affliction. Despite years of medical experience, he can't diagnose the problem or help. Riggs can tell right away that something is off about the man. It's like the idyllic island of Anne of Green Gables, but it soon gets turned upside-down when the starving stranger shows up in a boat. The odd thing, according to those at the diner, is that he looked to be starving: 'never in my life have I seen a man so wasted away.' Next, a Scout Troop, led by earnest scoutmaster Tim Riggs, goes on its yearly trek to an unpopulated island off the shores of Prince Edward Island. The novel opens with an online article from the Weird News Network about an unidentified male who has consumed five Hungry Man Breakfast platters in a local diner (each consisting of four eggs, three buttermilk pancakes, five rashers of bacon, sausage links and toast). What lifts this novel above the rest is Cutter's ability to put a fresh twist on horror conventions, while also writing a story that delivers the bodies.

A scary premise can easily begin to feel like a B-movie gag, given that the line between comedy and horror is so thin.

How does a celebrated writer handle horror?Ĭonventions in the horror genre tend to be obvious, but it is hard to do them well. And perhaps not wanting to confuse is the reason that the author, a well-known Canadian literary writer, took on the pseudonym Nick Cutter (you only need to look as far as the copyright page to know that it is Craig Davidson, who wrote the Giller Prize short-listed novel Cataract City). With the subtitle 'A Novel of Terror,' there isn't much room for confusion about the genre of The Troop.

The troop novel