Alex and Leslie Twisden have a perfect marriage complete with deep love for each other, significant careers, boundless wealth, a beautiful Manhattan mansion full of priceless antiques; the only thing missing is children. After endless procedures to conceive with no results, they are desperate to try anything. When they hear about the mysterious Dr. Kis, a successful fertility specialist in remote Slovenia, they decide he will be their last attempt. Injected with painful shots containing tissue extracts from several animal species, almost immediately Leslie becomes pregnant. But it's not a normal pregnancy and her food cravings are atrocious. Leslie delivers twins, Alice and Adam, and she and Alex are ecstatic. Finally, their lives are complete. Now if Alex and Leslie can just adjust to the horrific side effects they are both experiencing -- and that continue to escalate.
Ten years later, Alice and Adam are attractive, intelligent and loving children who attend private school by day -- but are locked in their rooms each and every night. Alex and Leslie do not want the twins to know what goes on in the house after dark, and keeping the twins imprisoned is the only way to protect them from the evil that's taken over their parents.
Terrified of their parents and what they hear going on each night in their home, Alice and Adam escape to the streets of Manhattan, where they are befriended by a pack of kids with similar backgrounds to their own. Alex and Leslie are in full hunter mode as they desperately attempt to locate their children.
Is there any possible way they can rectify the terrible situation they find themselves in and become a family again? When Leslie sees an interview of Dr. Kis on the Internet, he hints that he's been working on a way to reverse his fertility procedure for those with adverse side effects. To save all her life, Leslie is determined to find Dr. Kis, but is it too late? We never find out, since that's where the book ends. Let's hope the promised sequel is in the works, since there are a lot of unanswered questions.
Chase Novak (a pseudonym of Scott Spencer) has written a gruesomely gory and unsettling medical horror story with BREED. The mystery is riveting, while the novel's horrific perils of fertility treatments (and the outcomes!) are truly scary. I suggest you have a strong stomach to read some of the narrative concerning the eating habits of the characters. That said, I could not put the book down and really want to read the sequel for answers to those dangling plot threads.
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.
No excerpt available.
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