The Troop

“A bark of laughter from the bunkroom […] Tim let it go. At their age, boys were creatures of enormous energy: machines that ran on testosterone and raw adrenaline.”

Even before the introduction of the parasitic worms, the novel complicates the distinction between humans and animals by describing humans with metaphors or similes that compare them to animals. These early instances introduce the theme of The Murky Categories of Human, Animal, and Monster. For example, here, the boys are called “creatures,” and their laughter is described as a “bark,” suggesting they are more like dogs than humans. Dr. Tim Riggs seems to think that age has something to do with the distinction between animals and humans, viewing the boys as more animalistic than he is because they’re younger.

“A shape materialized from the tangled foliage. Tim inhaled sharply. By the light of the uncommonly bright moon, he beheld a creature stepped fully formed from his blackest childhood nightmares: a rotted monster who’d dragged itself from the sea.

It wasn’t much more than a skeleton lashed by ropes of waterlogged muscle, its flesh falling off its bones in gray, lace-edged rags. It lumbered forward, mumbling dully to itself. Tim’s terror pinned him in place.

The thing shambled through a shaft of moonlight that danced along the tall grass; the light transformed the nightmare into what it truly was: a man so horrifyingly thin it was a miracle he was still alive.”

This passage, where Tim first spots Tom Padgett, further blurs the distinction between humans, animals, and monsters and therefore relates to the theme of The Ethics of Bioengineering and Genetic Manipulation. Tim struggles to categorize and name what’s in front of him. In other words, categories by which humans distinguish themselves from non-humans blur due to scientific experimentation unchecked by ethics.

“The boys followed him for the simple reason that he was the biggest and strongest and harbored every expectation that he should be followed. It wasn’t that he had the best ideas—those were often attributable to Newt. It wasn’t that he was particularly charismatic, like Ephraim. It was that the boys were at an age where physical strength was the surest marker of leadership.

Kent had learned what little he knew of leadership from his father, who’d counseled: It’s all how you present yourself, son. Draw yourself up to your full height. Stick your chest out. If you look like you’ve got all the answers, people will naturally assume that you do.”

Despite Tim’s theory that children are more animalistic than adults, Kent’s father seems to be animalistic in the same ways as Kent. He advises Kent on how to be an “alpha male,” which mostly involves physically posturing oneself as if trying to fend off a bear.

“Those ride-alongs, his father enumerating the secrets and shames of their town, made Kent realize something: adults were fucked. Totally, utterly fucked. They did all the things they told kids not to do: cheated and stole and lied, nursed grudges and failed to turn the other cheek, fought like weasels, and worst of all they tried to worm out of their sins—they passed the buck, refused to take responsibility. It was always someone else’s fault […] Why should he respect adults—because they were older? Why, if that age hadn’t come with wisdom?

Kent came to see that adults required the same stern hand that his peers did. He was their equal—their better, in many ways. Physically this was already so: he was a full head taller than many of his teachers, and though he’d never tested this theory he believed himself to be stronger, too. Morally it was certainly so. Like his father said: Son, we are the sheepdogs. Our job is to circle the flock […] At first the sheep will hate us—after all, we hem them in, stop them from pursuing their basest nature—but in time they’ll come to respect us and soon enough they won’t be able to imagine their lives without us.”

This passage further erodes the difference between children and adults, as well as the difference between humans and animals. Kent’s father compares men like himself and his son to “sheep dogs” and others to “sheep.” Instead of thinking in terms of adults and children, Kent thinks in terms of alphas versus “the flock.” Even before the events of the novel unfold, Kent has already discovered the secret that adults aren’t perfect and aren’t likely to save the day, a realization that is part of the motif of Unreliable Authority Figures. Though that knowledge seems like it should be life-saving, ironically, in Kent’s case, this knowledge actually harms him.

“This was Newt’s role: the nurturer, the motherer. He had a natural affinity for it, and the boys sporadically accepted his ministrations—accepted it, then returned to making Newt the object of their torments. And Newt allowed it, because it had always been so.”

Newt is the one child in the novel whose father has never been around at all. Ephraim’s father is in prison, so he’s not around now, but Ephraim at least has memories of the man. Whereas some of the other boys (like Kent) constantly recall their fathers’ past advice, Newt often recalls advice from his mother instead. The other boys view Newt as “motherly” instead of “fatherly,” basing this on stereotypes of femininity and caretaking. The ways in which Newt takes care of people are not gendered—he just does whatever needs to be done, including dressing wounds, building fires, and hunting down food. In this sense, Newt ties into the motif of Fatherhood, depicting things that both mothers and fathers should do, but which the boys innately view as a “mother’s work”—at least until the end, when Max decides that Newt would actually be the best dad.

“Next they were upon him. Shelley went first. Kent followed. They bore down upon their Scoutmaster, leapt upon him, screaming and grabbing. Ephraim next. Then Max, with a low, agonized moan. They were filled with a giddy exuberance. All of them felt it—even Newton, who came last, regretfully, mumbling ‘No, no, no,’ even as he fell into the fray, unable to fight the queasy momentum. They were carried away on a wave of bestial aggression.

[…]

With his weight distributed among the five boys, he weighed no more than a child.”

When the boys attack Tim, the narrator blurs the distinction between humans and animals by using figurative language with animal imagery. Additionally, this passage makes the gap between adults and children smaller by infantilizing Tim. In this moment, Tim is both an unreliable authority figure and a depiction of “failed” fatherhood; the boys, who hold the power now, reduce Tim to a mere child.

“It is the equivalent of a Kamikaze pilot: its appetite quickens its own extinction cycle.”

The narrator often uses figurative language to compare humans to animals. In this case, though, Dr. Cynthia Preston uses personification to compare Dr. Edgerton’s genetically modified tapeworms to Kamikaze pilots—in other words, to compare animals to humans. The choice of comparison is also rather poignant: The worms are like humans who destroy themselves in their quest to destroy others. It foreshadows how, as the boundaries between humans and animals collapse, the result is something self-destructive as much as it is harmful to others.

“Newton realized that he could just get the hell out—it was one of the perks of being a kid, wasn’t it? Kids could abandon anything at any time with no real repercussions.

Except there were no adults around anymore. And he had work to do.”

This moment calls to the theme of The Continuum of Childhood to Adulthood. Newt reasons that the difference between adults and children hinges on both categories of people being present. With only children present, the difference doesn’t matter as much anymore. The remaining people now have to fulfill all the roles.

“We could share. Ephraim directed this desperate plea into his body like a phantom radio signal. Share ME—my body. Okay? But like, you can’t do to me what you did to Scoutmaster Tim. You really shouldn’t have done that. Maybe you can’t help yourselves? I get it. I have control issues, too. We could—what’s the word? Like, live together. But you can’t…you better not…don’t fucking eat me!

Ephraim screamed—the sound of a nail levered out of a wet plank of wood. What a colossal fucking idiot. Trying to reason with these things.”

Like Dr. Cynthia Preston, Ephraim also starts anthropomorphizing the worms (although he’s not actually infected, so he’s anthropomorphizing the idea of the worms). Rather than using figurative language, though, Ephraim speaks to the worms as if they can understand his human language (which in reality, they might). He quickly decides this effort is foolish, however, showing he is still undecided about the nature of humans, monsters, animals, and these worms.

“He remembered something his mother once said: The only way you’ll ever really know people is to see them in a crisis. People do the worst things to each other, Newton, Just the worst. Friendships, family, love and brotherhood—toss it all out the window.”

Newt summons his mother’s words to explain to himself why some of the others have started to behave erratically. However, ironically, none of this applies specifically to Newt, who keeps his values and loyalties alive until he dies.

“Max and the other boys didn’t pick on him because they despised him […] it was more a case of boys needing someone to single out. A fatted calf to sacrifice. They had to turn someone into that bottom rung on the ladder if only so they didn’t have to occupy it themselves. Boys weren’t that inventive, either. The simplest flaw would do. A lisp. An overbite. Dental braces. Being fat. Add to it a few glaring idiosyncrasies—such as being a know-it-all bookworm who was fascinated with mushrooms—and presto! One made-to-order sacrificial lamb.”

Max uses figurative language to further tease out the similarities between humans and other animals. The comparison of Newt to a sacrificial lamb describes the way the boys bully him while foreshadowing his fate at the end of the novel.

“‘Wha arr ooo loogin aaa?’ the boy-thing croaked.

What are you looking at?”

After Kent is infected and Shelley taunts him, Kent tries to start a fight like he would have done before he was infected. However, his dialogue changes (as did the dialogue of Padgett) as the illness advances—he no longer speaks in proper words, but in approximations that sound like grunts or animal sounds. Whenever people get infected, the narrator also starts referring to them as “it” and the “boy-thing” or “Kent-thing,” suggesting that the presence of the parasites undermines the person’s identity.

“Mom said, ‘Insects can make a home for themselves almost anywhere. They say that about cockroaches: if there’s ever a global Armageddon, they’ll be the only things left. You can’t beat a bug for adaptability.’ I think humans can be the same, too—don’t you think, Max? If we really need to, we can survive almost anywhere.”

Newt again summons his mother’s words in an attempt to understand the situation at hand. Ironically, bugs are the thing they’re fighting against, and yet Newt draws inspiration from their resilience and hopes to foster that same quality within himself and his friends. Newt’s role as a less traditional but ultimately admirable father figure provides both a foil to the failed father figures in the novel and a mechanism to explore The Continuum of Childhood to Adulthood.

“‘It’s love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes.’ He shrugs. ‘But that’s people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.’”

Dr. Clive Edgerton predicts that a virus like his bioengineered worms would be deadly because humans are too caring. A stark representation of unethical behavior within the theme of The Ethics of Bioengineering and Genetic Manipulation, Dr. Edgerton views kindness—not actors such as himself—as humanity’s greatest weakness. Ironically, Tim does what Edgerton predicts, but Shelley (who resembles Edgerton) actually contracts the virus by murdering someone (Kent), not by trying to cure or help someone.

“More than the other boys, Shelley was a realist. He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction.

A person profited nothing from being good.

It wasn’t as if Shelley had a choice. Ever since he could remember, he’d seen the world this way. People were things to be used, peeled back, opened up, roughly dissected and dismissed. All creatures on earth fell under the same cold scrutiny.”

One of the qualities that most characters associate with humans and adults (over animals and children) is rationality. However, Shelley is at once perhaps the most observant, intelligent, and quick-thinking character and the least “human” among the boys, as he lacks the moral compass that is also associated with humanity and adulthood.

“They were frightened, but that emotion rested with easy familiarity in their chests by now.”

This line shows how the group dynamics continue to change as the plot unfolds. The narrator’s treatment of the boys as a cohesive group, all sharing the same sensation at once, relates to the symbol of hive organisms, which is more overt with the worms. Whereas at first, chaos ensues, after a while, Newt and Max become somewhat acclimated to living in constant fear, and they adjust accordingly. In this way, these boys possess the adaptability and resilience that Newt admires in insects. However, exhibiting those abilities requires breaking out of the hive-organism thinking originally present among the troop.

“He felt the anger boiling out of him—which was how he figured it must always happen. Pressure turned into rage as surely as pressure turns coal into a diamond. Fear was an internal emotion: it got trapped inside of you. You had to let it out. For that you turned to rage, the ultimate external emotion.

All rage ever needed was something to focus on […]. Shelley rounded the cabin. Seeing him, Max’s chest hitched in sudden shock—hic!”

The first time Max feels true rage is when Ephraim dies, and he knows Shelley is somehow behind it—this realization is significant because Ephraim used to struggle to control his anger and often got in fights, whereas Max avoided conflict. Now, Max discovers what Ephraim understood: that fear and anger are two sides of the same coin, working in collaboration. Sometimes this relationship between fear and rage is a destructive thing, but other times, it’s necessary and more productive, such as now.

“The boys […]. They thought he was sick. They couldn’t be more wrong.

He wasn’t sick. He was simply changing into something entirely new.

[…]

The hateful boys had wounded him. They may have hurt his babies—but no, he could feel them squirming contentedly inside of him. Thank goodness.

The boys needed to die.

Shelley had been planning on killing them, anyway […] But now he’d kill them as a simple matter of principle. They had harmed him, which meant—inadvertently or otherwise—they had harmed his babies. And a father always defended his children.”

Shelley’s perception of the parasites as his children is an example of how the novel uses the motif of fatherhood to explore both the themes of The Continuum of Childhood to Adulthood and The Murky Categories of Human, Animal, and Monster. Shelley’s expression of love or care is a perversion of fatherhood, as his long-absent capacity to love manifests only to be directed toward something that is at once both animal and monster—something destructive. Much as Dr. Edgerton cannot appreciate human kindness, Shelley can only feel love for something non-human that will ultimately destroy him.

“The hunger was hellish, unspeakable, but one must suffer for what one loves.

[…]

None of that really mattered anymore, anyway. His home, his foolish parents, his teachers, the many jars buried in the backyard full of his playthings, all in various states of decomposition. That was his old life; his silly, forgettable life.

He was going to be a great daddy.

The best.”

This quote draws again on the motif of fatherhood to explore the blurred lines between adulthood and childhood and between human and monster. Later in the novel, a callback to this thought occurs when Max claims that Newt would have been the best dad.

“I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard. That’s what Mom does with me sometimes. She wants me to be so safe that it ends up hurting me in a weird way. But I get it, y’know? It must be the hardest thing in the world, caring for someone. Trying to make sure that person doesn’t come to harm.”

Here, Newt’s words ironically echo those of Dr. Edgerton, who predicted that the worms would spread because people love each other too much. Ironically, Edgerton was not totally right: In some cases, the illness spreads or causes death due to hatred, anger, and fear, not love. These reflections relate to the motif of Fatherhood and the theme of The Continuum of Childhood to Adulthood, eliciting questions about how fathers should approach the task of transforming boys into men.

“The thing that once went by the name of Shelley Longpre unfolded itself from a dark chalice in the rock. Crawling out like a spider, folding each of its long, pale limbs out, unpacking itself from its hiding spot with the showy grace of a contortionist.

‘Yessssss…’ it lisped, the hiss of an adder that crested and eddied.”

As with others before him, once Shelley is infected, the narrator starts referring to him as “it” and a “thing.” Additionally, although Shelley still speaks in sounds that resemble words, the sounds aren’t proper words and resemble animal sounds, in this case a snake’s hiss. All these changes suggest that the parasites alter the identity of the host.

“This fear of abandoning Newt was more profound, if less visceral, than that which he’d experienced back in the cavern: if Newton died, it meant all the terror and frustration and rage they’d both experienced had been for nothing.

If they couldn’t leave together, what had they done any of it for?”

Although horror novels often deal with visceral fears like illness or violence, they also address more “profound” fears like loss of loved ones, isolation, failure, rejection, and being powerless to fix a situation. Max claims that the more profound fears are what adults are usually still scared of, whereas the visceral fears are scarier to children. Here, Max comes of age somewhat because he starts to fear the “profound” things more deeply than the visceral things.

“Newton sat at the bow. He was wearing his Scouts sash adorned with the badges he’d earned. He wasn’t sure why he’d put it on—maybe he wanted to show whoever was waiting for them that he was a responsible person. An individual of value.”

Throughout the text, Newt struggles because people are too quick to judge him based on his appearance, and they miss out on everything he has to offer. In what seems to be an attempt to combat this perception, he adorns himself with all his impressive badges. Nonetheless, ironically, the military shoots him on arrival, killing him instantly.