CHARACTER
The Troopby Nick Cutter

Dr. Clive Edgerton

Dr. Clive Edgerton

Quick Facts

  • Role: Offstage architect of the Falstaff Island catastrophe; the novel’s primary antagonist
  • First appearance: Interstitial documents (a glossy magazine profile, lab journals, sworn testimony), not the main island narrative
  • Occupation: Physician-scientist and biotech researcher; self-styled “first-guesser”
  • Key relationships: Patient Zero; his lab assistant Nathan Erikson; a shadowy military research contractor
  • Notable moniker: “Joseph Mengele 2.0” (p. 53)

Who They Are

Boldly absent from the island but omnipresent in its horror, Dr. Clive Edgerton is the modern Frankenstein—brilliant, unbound, and disastrously amoral. He conceives a hyper-aggressive tapeworm with the sales pitch of a miracle weight-loss drug and the reality of a biological weapon. The boys descend into savagery; Edgerton starts from there, treating ethics as variables to control. In him, the clinical and the monstrous are the same impulse: curiosity cut free from conscience. He embodies The Breakdown of Civilization and Social Order at its source—a single calculated invention that unravels every human bond it touches.

Personality & Traits

Edgerton’s power lies not only in what he builds but in how he sees the world: people are systems to optimize or expend; compassion is a failure mode; knowledge justifies any method. Because the narrative meets him through paperwork and interviews, his voice arrives stripped of warmth, and the coldness is the point. The documents reveal a man who treats suffering as data, risk as strategy, and love as the ideal delivery system for doom.

  • Amoral and unethical: He boasts a history of sabotaging rivals (including strychnine) and treats Patient Zero as a disposable vessel. His lab journals clinically log torment in animals without a flicker of empathy, reducing pain to bullet points and metrics.
  • Obsessive and arrogant: Called a “genius” and “ratshit crazy” (p. 137), he prizes being a “first-guesser”—someone for whom the end always justifies the means. His tunnel vision turns human costs into acceptable loss.
  • Manipulative predator: He “trolls” the edges of town for a human test subject, breaking down his pitch in stages and sealing it with a “nice fat envelope” (p. 167–168). The recruitment itself is an experiment in consent engineered to fail.
  • Deeply cynical and misanthropic: He argues that love and care are the most efficient vectors for contagion, treating intimacy as a pathogen’s best friend. Altruism, to Edgerton, is leverage—proof that humanity can be weaponized against itself.
  • Disquieting presence: The magazine profile stresses a jockish, Broadway Joe bulk—“big… tall… muscular” with a shaved, “ovoid, vaguely alien” skull and “chilly green eyes” behind greasy lenses (p. 311–312). The body reads as power; the details read as warning.

Character Journey

Edgerton doesn’t evolve; our understanding of him does. He first flickers into view as a name attached to a parasite and a slur—“Joseph Mengele 2.0” (p. 53). Nathan Erikson’s testimony then sketches a volatile genius who swaps ethics for results. The lab journals complete the portrait, where pain is logged with the steady hand of a metronome. Finally, the glossy interview lets Edgerton explain himself, and the explanation is worse than the rumor: he believes love spreads disease, that nature favors predators, and that he is merely accelerating the inevitable. The arc is a revelation-by-document—each file deepening the chill until creator and creation feel morally indistinguishable.

Key Relationships

  • Thomas Henry Padgett: Edgerton’s Patient Zero is Thomas Henry Padgett, a desperate man converted into a “human blooper reel” (p. 9). Edgerton reads Padgett’s escape as a containment failure, not a tragedy, confirming that for him, personhood dissolves on contact with utility.
  • Nathan Erikson: As assistant and witness, Erikson is both admirer and canary. Edgerton relegates him to “lab monkey” status (p. 137) while concealing a military bioweapons angle, exploiting Erikson’s ambition and need for work. Erikson’s testimony becomes a moral mirror: he’s dazzled by the brilliance that terrifies him.

Defining Moments

Edgerton’s “scenes” are artifacts—each document opening a new aperture on the same void.

  • The lab journals: Guinea pig and chimpanzee trials (p. 123–125; 181–189) are clinically itemized as bodies lose themselves—“Subject is ingesting own fur… tearing a long strip of flesh off forehead… Two large hydatids break through the lens sacs of subject’s eyes” (p. 187–188). Why it matters: His prose is the horror—precision without pity, proving that the real experiment is the removal of empathy.
  • Recruiting Tom Padgett: He prowls “scumpits,” stages the pitch, then closes with cash (p. 167–168). Why it matters: It’s not just unethical research; it’s predation by design, a case study in how power finds and feeds on the vulnerable.
  • The final interview: He likens his worms to “Asian killer wasps” and names love as the ultimate pathogen (p. 312–313). Why it matters: The philosophy behind the parasite is frank nihilism; the real product he’s selling is the idea that human bonds are weaknesses to exploit.

Essential Quotes

Clive Edgerton is a genius. He's also ratshit crazy, pardon my French, possibly a sociopath, but undoubtedly a genius. Even though my IQ is likely higher than most people's in this room, I was no more than Clive’s lab monkey.
— Nathan Erikson's testimony (p. 137)

Erikson captures the paradox: brilliance that compels obedience even as it destroys trust. Calling himself a “lab monkey” shows how Edgerton reduces collaborators to instruments—intelligence doesn’t grant immunity from his hierarchy.

You can never be too rich or too thin. If I can make the rich thin, they’ll make me rich.
— Dr. Clive Edgerton (p. 138)

This is the sales pitch that rationalizes atrocity. He frames the parasite as a luxury product, turning vanity into a growth market—an ethical sleight of hand that masks weaponization as wellness.

They say cockroaches will be the last things left on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Don’t believe it. The last thing on earth will be a worm in the guts of those cockroaches, sucking them dry.
— Dr. Clive Edgerton (p. 313)

Edgerton’s worldview is evolutionary pessimism: predators outlast their hosts, parasitism is destiny. By casting the worm as the final survivor, he positions his creation as nature’s heir—apocalypse as product validation.

Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man? 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. On and on it goes.
— Dr. Clive Edgerton (p. 313)

Here the moral horror is explicit: compassion is not a virtue to Edgerton; it’s a mechanism. The boys’ attempts to care for each other become liabilities in his calculus, proving that his true target is the social fabric the island tries—and fails—to preserve.