The Troop
Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip. This year, something is waiting in the darkness. Something wicked.... An intruder stumbles upon their campsite like a wild animal. He is shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry. Within his body is a bioengineered nightmare, a horror that spreads faster than fear. One by one, the boys will do things no person could ever imagine....
Where The Troop keeps showing up
Five of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about The Troop
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On a small island off the coast of Prince Edward Island, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs and five teenage Scouts are settling in for a three-day weekend when a wasted stranger washes up on the beach asking for food.
Yes. The Troop is widely cited as one of the most genuinely terrifying body horror novels of the 2010s. Stephen King praised it publicly. Most readers find the parasitic-infection content unrelentingly disturbing.
The Troop was written by Nick Cutter, the pen name of Canadian novelist Craig Davidson. Cutter has also written The Deep, Little Heaven, and The Handyman Method.
The Troop is 363 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Troop takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Troop is a standalone novel by Nick Cutter, not part of a series.
The Troop is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
