A Book A Week

How far would you go to make your dream a reality? Alex and Leslie Twisden seem to have it all. Money is no issue, and they live in a beautiful home in New York's Upper East Side. Despite everything they have, beginning a family of their own has completely evaded them. The pair have agreed to have a child no matter what the cost. Now having exhausted almost every option in conceiving a child, the couple is desperate. When a colleague at work recommends a treatment Alex has never heard of, he's eager to share the news with Leslie. For her part, Leslie is skeptical at best. The expensive procedure will be performed by a doctor that hasn't appeared in her extensive research, and she's not exactly sold on flying to a foreign country to meet with this expert. However, her desire for a child persists, so she finally agrees to go along. Their experience will be traumatic but effective. 

From the outside looking in, twins Adam and Alice Twisden seem to have perfectly normal lives. They live in an affluent neighborhood, attend a good school, and have parents who love them. Behind closed doors, though, things aren't what they seem. Each night without fail, the Twisdon Twins are locked into their bedroom by their reclusive parents. What are they being secured from? The twins aren't exactly sure, but they do know that they hear strange noises coming from their parent's room, noises that are more animal than human. 

I've had Breed on my TBR shelf for nearly a decade. At the time I purchased it, I was reading through many of Stephen King's classic works, and I was hungry for more horror novels. Author Scott Spencer, writing under the pseudonym Chase Novak, has written a chilling novel that more than kept the pages turning. The first half deals with parents who are desperately traveling to the ends of the earth to conceive a child. The cost of their desperation leads to side effects that are downright horrifying. There's a sadness to the situation that Novak deftly handles. We can't help but empathize with the characters as they do anything and everything to get their wish. The second half of the novel is less narratively cohesive than that of the first. It was fun to see the kids dealing with the reality of their family, but it was far more inconsistent in tone than the opening half. Still, Breed succeeds as a solid popcorn read with just the right amount of spookiness to satisfy readers this time of the year. 

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(2022, 46)