3. The Troop by Nick Cutter and The Deep by Nick Cutter
The funny thing about Nick Cutter is, you can be marveling over his beautifully-bleak observations about the human condition, or the phenomenal way he puts together sentences, and then a page later you’re considering throwing your book across the room rather than finish reading one of the grossest, goriest scenes you’ve ever encountered. So yeah, The Troop and The Deep are a RIDE.
In the former, Cutter’s horror novel drops us onto a small, remote island off the coast of Canada, where a Boy Scout troop and their lone adult leader have been left to fend for themselves for the weekend. It’s supposed to be a fun-filled few days of survival techniques and bonding and whatever else you do when you don’t have your phone or Wi-Fi. Unfortunately for everyone involved, a mysterious visitor infected with something sinister washes up on shore, and things go downhill, fast. Way downhill. Like, down the hill and straight to the darkest pits of hell. (There’s one scene involving a turtle that I absolutely could not read. It was that disgusting and disturbing.)
The Deep is far more f*cked up, in my opinion. In fact I actually wasn’t able to even finish it, which almost never happens. I loathe not finishing a book. And as such I very rarely do so, unless things are truly dire, which ended up being the case with Cutter’s 2015 novel when I realized things were very obviously leading to another brutal animal death. For what it’s worth, The Deep has been hailed as the perfect mix of The Abyss and The Shining, and I was genuinely excited to ~dive~ into this one (el oh el) at first. I enjoyed what I read for the most part (I got to around 65 percent), especially how successful Cutter is at creating such an intensely claustrophobic sense of terror as the main character enters an isolated underwater lab down in the Mariana Trench. So, if you’re made of stronger stuff than I am, I actually would still recommend it. What I’d read up until that point was freaky as hell, and had set up some really interesting (and potentially supernatural?) twists and turns to come. Alas!
