#Friday56 & #BookBeginnings - The Troop by Nick Cutter

I decided to do my Friday memes here at Castle Macabre today since I'm featuring a horror novel. So, to avoid confusion to those who visited me last week at True Book Addict...this is my sister blog. Welcome!

Since I'll be reading this for my Spring into Horror Read-a-Thon next week, I thought it would be a good one to feature.

For Book Beginnings:

Headline from The Weird News Network, online edition, October 19:

THE HUNGRY MAN OF PRINCE COUNTY

BY Huntington Mulvaney

Fearsome news, dear readers, from one of our loneliest outposts--the tiny fishing community of Lower Montgague, Prince Edward Island. A forlorn, foreboding spike of rock projecting into the Atlantic Ocean.

     The perfect location for devilry, methinks? Thankfully for you, we have eyes and ears everywhere. We see all, we hear all.

     Sadie Adkins, waitress at the Diplomat Diner in Lower Montague, had her late-model Chevrolet truck stolen from the restaurant's lot last night by an unnaturally emaciated thief. Adkins placed a call to our toll-free tip line after her entreaties to local deputy dawgs were cruelly and maliciously rebuffed, deemed--and we quote--"ludicrous" and "insane."

     "I know who stole my damn truck," Adkins told us. "Starvin; Marvin."

     An unidentified male, with close-cropped hair and baggy clothing, entered the Diplomat at 9 p.m. According to Adkins, the man was in a severe state of malnourishment.

     "Skinny! You wouldn't believe," Adkins told our intrepid truth-gathers. "Never in my life have I seen a man so wasted away. But hungry."

     Adkins reports that the unidentified male consumed five Hungry Man Breakfast platters--each consisting of four eggs, three buttermilk pancakes, five rashers of bacon, sausage links, and toast.

     "He ate us out of eggs," Adkins said. "Just kept shoveling it in and asking for more. His belly must have swelled up tight as a drum. He...well, he...when I came back with his third platter, or maybe it was his fourth, I caught him eating the napkins. Ripping them out of the dispenser, chewing and swallowing them."

     The unidentified man paid his bill and left. Shortly thereafter Adkins went outside to find her truck stolen--yet another malicious indignity!

     "I can't say I was too surprised," she said. "The man seemed desperate in every way a man can possibly be desperate."

     She fell silent again before adding one final grisly detail:

     "I could hear something coming from inside him--I'm saying, under his skin. I know that sounds silly."

     

For Friday 56:

We could die--this thought cleaved Ephraim's mind like a guillotine blade. One of us could start to fall, and someone will try to help--Scout Law number two: A Scout is ever loyal to his fellows; he must stick to them through thick and thin--then another and another until everyone gets pulled down like a string of paper dolls.

The Troop by Nick Cutter

Once a year, scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a three-day camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story and a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—stumbles upon their campsite, Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. An inexplicable horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival that will pit the troop against the elements, the infected...and one another.

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This book has been well-liked by people I respect in the horror, and general reading, communities. And Stephen King said this, "The Troop scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t put it down. This is old-school horror at its best." Enough said!