Finished Breed by Chase Novak. I received a copy of this from the publisher at BEA.
Practically from the day they married, Alex and Leslie wanted to have kids. Except for Leslie’s inability to get pregnant, their lives are pretty perfect. They have great jobs and a ton of money. But it doesn’t really matter, because what they really want is a baby. Then they learn about a doctor in Slovenia who is having incredible success with infertile couples. And it works for them, too—they have twins (Adam and Alice). Except now there’s something very wrong with Alex and Leslie.
This is such an intensely creepy story. This is compared to Rosemary’s Baby, but that’s not really a fair comparison. It’s sort of the inverse of Rosemary’s Baby.
The idea behind Rosemary’s Baby is that you don’t always know who your children are. Most of the time, they’re perfectly normal. But sometimes (Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Bad Seed, The Exorcist) you are raising a monster. An actual evil monster, as opposed to a bratty kid.
With this book, though, the terror comes from the fact that the parent is the one who changes. And it’s not in the way that parenthood is supposed to change you, making you kinder and more patient and able to function on less sleep. No, in Breed, the parent becomes the actual, literal monster.
But even beyond the premise, this book is not for the faint of heart. It’s disgusting. And I am someone who owns the first two Hostel movies, so my threshold for “gross” is pretty high. Still, there were times with this book where I felt a little sick. I didn’t have to stop reading but I came close a few times.
Still, if you can handle it, absolutely read this book.
