Breed: A Novel by Chase Novak

It should be noted that this was on my kindle for so long that the cover changed. The first cover was creepy because it had the bloody silhouette of a pregnant woman. This cover is creepy because it has a quote from Stephen King about how good it is.

Alex and Leslie live in New York, pretty close to being in the 1%. While he’s older, she’s a trophy for sure. They have seemingly everything perfect in their lives–except for a baby. But while modern western medicine yields no results, the couple go to a small town in Slovenia and see a very strange doctor. The doctor promises amazing results and after a very painful process, the two find themselves expecting.

Fast forward to ten years later. They have two beautiful twins–Adam and Alice. Adam and Alice go to a very nice school, but they have some stringent restrictions. They don’t go to many after school activities, nor do they have people over. And their parents are rarely seen. It’s only at night that Adam and Alice are truly scared, as the baby monitors they use to keep track of their parents have harsh whispers of the things that their parents want to do to Alice and Adam. Their parents want to eat their children.

Adam plots and spirits them away in the middle of the night, but their parents trace them. And it isn’t until they split up that they realize there are even deeper, darker forces at work. And that they are not the only children whose parents struggled with infertility AND that want to eat their children. Can Adam and Alice survive, or will they be reunited with their parents not only at dinner, but AS dinner?

I just want to say that I love weird horror. Richard Laymon is one of my favorite horror writers. But this, this book was troubling. It had some great medical possibilities, but perhaps I’ve read too much Crichton. I feel like the procedure wasn’t explained well enough, and without science to back it up. The sequel is much better, but still weird.