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Critically celebrated novelist Scott Spencer delivers a Rosemary's Baby-like novel of gothic horror, set against the backdrop of modern-day Upper East Side Manhattan.
Alex and Leslie Twisden lead charmed lives-fabulous jobs, a luxurious town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a passionate marriage. What they don't have is a child, and as they try one infertility treatment after the next, yearning turns into obsession. As a last-ditch attempt to make their dream of parenthood come true, Alex and Leslie travel deep into Slovenia, where they submit to a painful and terrifying procedure that finally gives them what they so fervently desire . . . but with awful consequences.
Ten years later, cosseted and adored but living in a house of secrets, the twins Adam and Alice find themselves locked into their rooms every night, with sounds coming from their parents' bedroom getting progressively louder, more violent, and more disturbing.
Driven to a desperate search for answers, Adam and Alice set out on a quest to learn the true nature of the man and woman who raised them. Their discovery will upend everything they thought they knew about their parents and will reveal a threat so horrible that it must be escaped, at any cost.
Breed is the story of the American Dream gone wrong, of having everything and it never being enough, of loving those who potentially hurt us the most, and ultimately of love conquering our darkest urges. I had heard amazing early buzz about Breed before BEA and I was so happy to receive a copy there. Let me tell you now, although Breed took some twists I didn't anticipate, I was by no means disappointed. I finished this book in one page-turning, hair-raising day and loved every minute of it.
So, Alex and Leslie have a fairy tale romance. They love each other deeply, have great jobs, have more money and luxury than they could possibly need. They simply have it all...except...they want children, their own children and are unable to make them. Enter a last ditch effort at fertility through a shady connection and even more dubious doctor. Everything should work out just perfectly, right?
Cut to ten years later and they have two beautiful twins Alice and Adam. They are gorgeous, brilliant, clever, loving...and being held prisoner in their beautiful Upper East Side home. In order to protect them from eminent danger, Alex and Leslie lock the twins up every night without fail. Leaving the adults to continue their descent into evil while keeping their precious darlings safe.
The chase is on as Alice and Adam search for answers about themselves and try to save themselves from certain death. Breed is not for the faint of heart. (Pet lovers in particular, be prepared.) It is gory, messy and disturbing in all of the best ways. The mystery is compelling and the stakes are high.
After finishing Breed I had two distinct thoughts: 1. This would make a great movie and 2. This book needs a sequel. As far as the first thought goes, it remains to be seen, but is probably very likely. And about that second thought, Breed didn't immediately scream sequel to me (I thought it was a stand alone novel) and the ending is not a desperate cliff-hanger (although very shocking). Breed stands very well on its own, but I wanted to know more. More about the minor characters, more about the fates of Adam and Alice, more about the impact of this fertility treatment on the rest of the world. Well, friends, my wishes are coming true. According to the NY Times, Chase Novak (AKA award-winning writer, Scott Spencer) has said he is indeed planning a sequel, Brood. I, for one, can't wait!
6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.tamsparks
Posted September 23, 2012
Breed has been compared to Rosemary’s Baby, but if anything, it’s the opposite: innocent children are born to monstrous parents. Leslie and Alex Twisden are an affluent couple living in an immense townhouse in Manhattan, and have everything money can buy, except for one thing: a child. After countless fertility procedures and thousands of dollars, the Twisden’s are desperate and will do anything to conceive. One day they run into a couple they know from a support group. The wife, Jill, is hugely pregnant. Alex manages to talk the couple into giving up their secret, and before long, Leslie and Alex are on a plane to a small town in Slovenia to meet with a Dr. Kis, the miracle worker behind Jill’s pregnancy. Although Leslie is worried about the filthy doctor’s office and the wild and unkempt Dr. Kis, Alex convinces her to submit to some very painful injections. Back in their hotel room, the couple discovers they are ravenous for each other, and spend a long and unbridled night in bed together, during which Leslie conceives.
But the couple’s joy begins to dwindle when they start to notice changes to their bodies: hair that grows in strange places and an insatiable appetite for red meat. Leslie’s pregnancy only lasts five months, at which time twins Adam and Alice are born. The story abruptly fast forwards to ten years later, as Adam and Alice have begun to realize just how dangerous their family is. The twins, who have been locked in their rooms every night for the past ten years, decide to run away. What follows is an extended chase scene through the streets of New York and Central Park as the children run for their lives.
Novak has a perfect writing style for horror, and the horror in Breed is the kind that grows so gradually that it literally bludgeons you over the head when you aren’t looking. His writing is gorgeous and lyrical, and not the sort of writing one usually encounters in a horror novel. This lulls the reader into believing that things maybe aren’t so bad. But then the bad stuff inevitably arrives, and the reader is knocked out. Each horrific detail is absurdly and gleefully rendered. I’ve read my share of graphic and bloody horror, and I can tell you I wasn’t quite prepared for some of the scenes in this book. But the violence isn’t thrown in randomly. It’s calculated to illustrate just how horrible those fertility injections were, and it didn’t feel out-of-place at all.
I loved the parallel between the parent’s descent into madness and the way their house gradually loses its shine. Every aspect of the story falls into disrepair as Leslie and Alex lose their humanity. I found myself sympathizing with them, even after witnessing the horrible things they do. Leslie and Alex truly want to be good parents and love their children, but there are circumstances beyond their control that prevent them from doing so.
Breed accomplishes what the best horror stories set out to do: it makes us fearful about the most normal and mundane aspects of being human. It poses the questions “How badly do you really want to have children?” and “What happens when you can’t trust the adults who are raising you?” Its underlying message could be this: having children will ruin your life. If you are pregnant, and especially if you are trying to get pregnant, Breed might not be your best choice of reading material. But if you are looking for a beautifully written and terrifying piece of work, take my advice and grab a copy as soon as possible.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.As much as I was looking forward to this book, by the end I hated it. No, hated it not a strong enough word. I loathed this book. This book was a perfect example of a great idea that was executed terribly.
***Warning: From this point forward this review may contain spoilers. Stop reading now to remain unspoiled.***
The basic premise of this was intriguing. An affluent couple who is so desperate to have a child that they travel to an unknown part of the world to have an unknown procedure performed on them. Here is where I ran into my first problem. At one point Leslie decides not to go through with the procedure. I can’t argue with her, she’s in a country she’s never heard of, in a filthy office, about to be injected by a weird doctor with something and the doctor won’t tell her what it is. She starts hollering and the doctor orders her husband from the room…and he complies! For all he knows they are holding her down and injecting her against her will! I was furious on her behalf. But then I got furious with her. She just lets it go and proceeds on their lives together, including having sex with him that same day! I would have gotten a good divorce lawyer before I was out the door of the office after beaning the doctor in his skull with my foot! So that bothered me.
Another huge problem I had with the beginning of the story was the POV. It was written in third person omniscient. So it basically read like a news report. We would see what was happening and how it happened. But we’d have no idea why it happened, what they thought or felt about what happened, or any of the details that make you care about the characters. For that reason I found that I didn’t really care about Leslie or Alex because the only things I could see about them were ignorant, selfish, and horrendously stupid.
After the twins are born the POV shifts to third person close, which was slightly better than before but by that point I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t care about the plot, I wanted something to happen. Yeah yeah, I get it the parents are monsters now. Gotcha, now let’s do something with it. What they did was that the twins ran away and spent most of the book running from their parents. Along the way they discover other kids that are like them and who have parents like them. Apparently there are hundreds of these people wandering around and yet…no one else in the world has noticed.
We also learn a little bit about the original doctor and what was in the original shots. I was excited about that and expected this story to become a quest for answers. But it didn’t. We were still on some stupid chase from the parents which was boring and starting to drag. And THEN we go on a quest for answers back to the original doctor. All I could think was, “Why did no one think of this in the last 10 years?” But even that proved worthless because there were no answers to be had. The plot never went anywhere and then you reached the end and realized that you had spent several hundred pages on a pointless quest for nothing. This plot had so much potential and all of it was squandered. When I reached the end of the book I was mostly relieved that it was over. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. All that you’ll gain from it is feeling vaguely nauseous and then being angry that there was no pay off for the grossness.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Horror is not a genre I often read. I used to read Stephen King (Cujo), and Peter Straub's Ghost Story scared the heck out of me. I don't read any of the vampire/werewolf novels that are so popular now, so I'm not sure what drew me to Chase Novak's Breed.
A cross between Rosemary's Baby (a classic horror novel I did read) and the vampire/werewolf genre, Alex and Leslie Twisden, two perfectly lovely Upper East New York City residents lead a wonderful life: fulfilling jobs, a happy marriage, an enjoyable social life. Having a baby would make everything perfect.
Alex is heir to a fortune, and they live in his family's incredible townhouse. After trying for a long time unsuccessfully to have a baby, the support group they belong to is starting to grate on them. Throwing money at the situation hasn't helped, but when they run into a former support group couple on the street and see that they are pregnant, they beg the couple to share their secret.
They get the name of a doctor in Eastern Europe, and off they go. When they get there, the situation is very scary and Leslie doesn't trust the doctor. But Alex convinces her to take the treatment and Leslie becomes pregnant.
Fast forward ten years and we meet their twins Alice and Adam. Every night the children are locked in their bedrooms, and they hear frightening, animalistic noises coming from their parents room. As the noises become more disturbing, Adam convinces Alice that they must escape or something horrible will befall them.
Leslie and Alex have been almost reclusive, unable to work, and their home has fallen down around them. The once beautiful showplace looks like homeless drug addicts live there. They live like animals, and any animals in their path had better scurry.
When Leslie and Alex find their children have escaped, the chase is on. Adam makes his way to a trusted teacher's apartment, where Alex tracks him. Alice ends up in Central Park and finds a group of mysterious children who have some kind of connection to her.
The children's ventures into the scary underbelly of New York made the hair on my arms stand up. Alex is always on the trail, one step behind them and when he finds them hell breaks loose.
I wasn't really satisfied with the end of the novel, however. I wasn't sure how it would end, but the end seemed a bit abrupt to me.
This is a violent, scary, disturbing, grotesque novel, one I never would have normally chosen to read, yet I couldn't stop reading. Novak (a pseudonym for writer Scott Spencer, who wrote Endless Love) knows how to keep the reader turning the pages.
It's the kind of book where you find that you have to force yourself to breathe out, and any little noise will make you peer into the dark corner of the bedroom fearing what you may find. Read this one with the lights on.
Although there are young protagonists in the book, this is not a book for young teens.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Good plot line but a little too explicit for my taste. Hard to read if you're an animal lover
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.sheltisebastian
Posted April 8, 2013
The best horror novel I have read in a long time!!! Very well written.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Dukewife
Posted January 30, 2013
One very scary book. Saw it recommended by Stephen King and he knows his scary!! Such a quick read because you gotta know what's going to happen!
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged."...When I read the description of this book on LibraryThing Early Reviewers and requested a copy, it sounded to me like a straight-up werewolf novel. I thought maybe the parents and/or the kids are werewolves, and they terrorize Manhattan and yadda yadda yadda. But no. Well, okay, there is some terrorizing going on, but it did not play out even remotely in any of the ways I expected...the pace of the book is fairly constant. I don't think I felt it ever slowed down, and since things aren't exactly resolved at the end, I still have a lingering sense of uncertainty and maybe a little dread. I think fans of Stephen King would probably not be disappointed with Chase Novak and Breed."
(For full review, please visit me at Here Be Bookwyrms on Blogger)
Reviewed by Anne Boling for Readers Favorite
Alex and Leslie Twisden had it all except a child. They had tried everything they could think of except adoption. Leslie had had enough and so she wanted to stop trying. She wanted to adopt a child but Alex would not hear of it. When Alex heard of a technique that worked for an acquaintance he was determined they would have one last try. They traveled a great distance to Slovenia and paid a great deal of money to Dr. Kis. His treatment was unconventional but had a proven success rate. The doctor neglected to tell the couple there were side effects to the treatment. The treatment was successful in that it produced children. The ten year old twins, Alice and Adam, were frightened of the increasingly loud violent noises they heard at night and could not understand why they were locked in their room each night. The children managed to escape and set out on a journey that would bring them disturbing answers to their questions.
“Breed” is the prefect name for this horror story by Chase Novak. Readers beware, this tale is not for the faint of heart. The blood details are both violent and graphic. There were times when I had to turn off my audio book and picked it up a while later. I had chills as I read the details of what happened to the victims. In all honesty I would call everyone in this tale a victim. This book is shocking, riveting, nonstop action and downright bloody. Novak is a superior writer. He has more talent in his little finger than most writers have in their whole body. He made me feel as if I was part of the story. I was fearful for the children, animals and the general public. I was fearful for me. I kept checking behind me to make sure there wasn’t a hungry hairy person creeping up on me. Fans of horror, don’t miss this one. The format of my book was audio and was read by Peter Ganim. His voice was prefect for the narrative. He drew me in and did not let me go. The sound quality was superior. I highly recommend “Breed.” I recently read that Chase Novak is working on a sequel to “Breed.” I eagerly await the release of “Brood.”
Anonymous
Posted November 30, 2012
I enjoyed this book very much. It was graphic in details making it that much more vivid
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted November 20, 2012
If you really want your steadfast heart's desire, be careful because you might get a lot more than you realize. This is an excellent story about just that very thing. A real gripping, ' got to see what happens next ' book. I highly recommend it.
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Posted October 26, 2012
I really liked this book for several reasons. It was so suspenseful and even funny at times, very different form the usual types of books I read. I would describe it as a Stephen King type of story.
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Posted October 14, 2012
Great book! Kept me totally hooked. Disgusting at times with the author being so descriptive.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 28, 2012
This was really good. Scary, but good. A thriller in the true sense of the word.
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Posted September 24, 2012
The first book to actually frighten me in the past 5 years. It's Rosemary's Baby with a twist.
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Posted September 22, 2012
Heard this one reviewed on NPR. A great read for an underrated genre. The novel is fast-paced and the characters interesting. Told in the tradition of Frankenstein and "Rappaccini's Daughter", it's a great read.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted September 12, 2012
To me it was not very good was disapointed in it i should have saved my money
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 26, 2013
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Posted February 18, 2013
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Posted April 21, 2013
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Overview
Critically celebrated novelist Scott Spencer delivers a Rosemary's Baby-like novel of gothic horror, set against the backdrop of modern-day Upper East Side Manhattan.
Alex and Leslie Twisden lead charmed lives-fabulous jobs, a luxurious town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a passionate marriage. What they don't have is a child, and as they try one infertility treatment after the next, yearning turns into obsession. As a last-ditch attempt to make their dream of parenthood ...