It begins like a campfire story: five boys and a grownup went into the woods...
It will end in madness and murder. And worse...
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 stumbles upon their campsite—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—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.
Part Lord of the Flies, part 28 Days Later—and all-consuming—this tightly written, edge-of-your-seat thriller will take readers deep into the heart of darkness and close to the edge of sanity.
***
Imagine how different the world would look if a real diet pill existed; if losing weight was a simple sugar solution away. Think for a minute about how dramatically that would change the day to day. It'd be revolutionary, in truth. And it would make certain people very rich indeed.
Dr. Clive Edgerton, for one, isn't in it for the money. It's the science that interests him: the science, in this instance, of adapting a hydatid for use in human hosts. Awful as the thought is, a tapeworm which could be introduced to our systems with one pill and passed after another—once it had done its dirty work—would be a great breakthrough... one the determined doctor is on the very precipice of making.
He's ready, if you can credit it, to start testing Thestomax in earnest: a fascinating narrative strand that The Troop simply isn't interested in. Instead, Nick Cutter—"a pseudonym for an acclaimed [Canadian] author of novels and short stories," per the press release I received—dubs Edgerton "Dr. Death" and treats his quest as the premise for an absorbing, albeit appalling body horror novel that reads like The Lord of the Flies meets Mira Grant's Parasite.
Dr. Clive Edgerton, for one, isn't in it for the money. It's the science that interests him: the science, in this instance, of adapting a hydatid for use in human hosts. Awful as the thought is, a tapeworm which could be introduced to our systems with one pill and passed after another—once it had done its dirty work—would be a great breakthrough... one the determined doctor is on the very precipice of making.
He's ready, if you can credit it, to start testing Thestomax in earnest: a fascinating narrative strand that The Troop simply isn't interested in. Instead, Nick Cutter—"a pseudonym for an acclaimed [Canadian] author of novels and short stories," per the press release I received—dubs Edgerton "Dr. Death" and treats his quest as the premise for an absorbing, albeit appalling body horror novel that reads like The Lord of the Flies meets Mira Grant's Parasite.