There's plenty of books I've stopped reading partway through, but every one of those times was the result of boredom. When I was younger I would push on no matter what. However, by the time a fella reaches my age, he's put up with a lot of crap that he shouldn't have put up with. It's very possible that I've reached the halfway point of my natural existence (or I could be past that point, maybe even by quite a distance. Oh God I've freaked myself out again). There's not enough time left for me to waste. It's no longer good enough for a book to 'get interesting later on'. Get me at the start, or I'm moving on.
The Troop is not a boring book. That is not the reason why I put it down and may never return to it ever, ever again. This, despite the fact that I would LOVE to know how it all turns out.
Nick Cutter's a pretty damn good writer. I actually read his second novel first, The Deep, and I only picked it up because of the Stephen King quote on the cover (yep, some marketing ploys really do work).
So, the world's in trouble - there's a plague sweeping the world and nobody's got a chance against it. That is, until a substance is found in a trench at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a substance that just might be able to cure anything. Scientists have been down there in a research lab studying this discovery, but all has gone very, very quiet. It's up to a select few to go down there and find out what's going on.
There's plenty going on. There is no way that anyone getting to the end of the book will be able to say they saw any of it coming. No way.
The book is good fun, and clatters along at a pretty swift pace. That's a big plus for me. I can't stand big chunks of description or explanations the length of instruction manuals of how things work. I want a story to move, and this one gets a hurry on. It's got a bit of The Thing about it. Comparisons to The Abyss are way off the mark though.
The gruesome stuff's kinda queasy - and bizarre, impressively so. There's some wild imagination at work here, enough so that by the end I was slightly wondering what kind of guy Cutter might be, and if his family was comfortable living with him. He also does a great job of conveying the claustrophobia of being so far underwater, and the unnerving nearness of madness due to the pressures way, way down there.
The Deep is well recommended, as long as you have a bit of a tolerance for the grim and the weird.
In the back was an advert for his first novel, The Troop, and the idea of getting it lingered in my mind for a while. I read a few other books first, then, after Clive Barker's Scarlet Gospels (which is messed up in so many ways - don't read it after Abarat!), I got stuck into Cutter's debut.
Oh dear.
So, a small troop of scouts is taken on a 3-day camping trip on a little island. Unfortunately, they land there on the same day as another gentleman. He's a man infected by something terrible and man-made. Something that's driving him to eat whatever is near him (quite literally anything). Something that is devouring every trace of energy in his body. It's something that's going to get out.
Characterisation is great. The author really gets that 13 year old kids are kind-of unpleasant and gross and sweary and slap-happy with rude talk (they are, all of them - even yours, madam). They're likable too, though. Most of them. And that's a tricky bit of writing to pull off. It makes what happens to them all the more unpleasant.
Now, I grew up with horror films. I was 7 when the video nasty drama kicked off, and I had a step-family that was non-too concerned about the kinds of things I was seeing when they rented out tapes. There was a guy came door-to-door, had all the stuff that had just been banned - most of the boxes had no certificates on them, just tremendous images and warnings of the horrors inside. Since that point, I've seen that many horror films that I've reached terminal boredom with the whole thing. Spooks bother me, gore is a bore.
This book, however. Damn. It beat me.
It's all kinds of gross. If you've ever seen or heard of body melt horror films, this is pretty much the book version of that unpleasant genre. If you can't deal with infections or tapeworms or flesh-eating disease, then stay well away. Once the infected man lands on the island, it doesn't let up. At all. I had a pretty bad time with it, up until about the midway point, where something is about to happen to a boy's fingers. There it was - my limit. I ran out of bravery. I suspect I'm getting softer as I get older, but that scene pushed Off buttons I didn't know I had (there seem to be a lot of people on Goodreads who enjoyed the gruesome stuff to a surprising degree - it's a tad worrying). I couldn't carry on.
It's never happened before. But I suppose some things happen with age.
Mr. Cutter (I've since learned this is a pen name), I will read whatever book you attack us with next, but The Troop and I are done.
Tell me about any books you couldn't finish (and not because they were boring). In the mean time,
Laters
