The story almost instantly pivots when Scout Master Tim discovers Patient X, washed ashore, pale and inhumanly skinny, able and willing to eat both anything and everything. Only, that’s not quite what The Troop is, despite the back cover blurb and the lonely, lightening blasted island displayed on the cover. I’ve long been a fan of the spooky stranded stories, ala John Carpenter’s The Thing. Add in the paranoia bred of the unknown – an unseen, easily transferred sort of disease, bioengineered, supernatural, or natural – and you have the recipe for a subtle story that examines the weaknesses and fears of the paranoid human mind set against the backdrop of a kill-and-be-killed sort of nature. Enter a stranded boat, a very sick and ravenous man, a sudden storm, a military quarantine, and boys becoming men as the clock ticks and they try to survive both the new infestation of the island and each other. They are cut off from the world, back to nature, working on those badges and nurturing the sort of tenuous surface level relationships that evolve from all forced group dynamics. This story of a lost Boy Scout troop starts on an out-of-the-way island with five pre-adolescent boys and their rugged yet sensitive scoutmaster. The Troop jumped on my radar based on a recommendation by Stephen King.
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