Breed

A Novel

Contributors

By Chase Novak

Read by Peter Ganim

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Sep 4, 2012
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781619691933

Price

$31.99

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 4, 2012. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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.

  • "Forget vampires, zombies and guys clad in hockey masks brandishing oversized machetes. Chase Novak unleashes truly scary literary horror villains in BREED: Mom and Dad. Novak...explores what happens when one's parents aren't quite the protectors they should be in this excellent horror novel. He probes emotionally deep and heartbreaking themes of family and friendship that seem fresh in a book that's a bit like a mad-scientist movie-or Frankenstein if the monster decided he needed some kiddos in his life.... The kids escape their domestic prison, which shifts gears in BREED from a psychological tale to a high-stakes adventure where your fingers can't flip the pages fast enough.... BREED doesn't need love triangles, twist endings or aspects of a gore fest to keep an audience enraptured. Instead, it's the simple conceit-how do you love parents who do more harm than good?-and a moving ending that make Novak's horror novel a thrill to read."
    Brian Truitt, USA Today
  • "Advanced reproductive technologies prove just a new form of mad science in this timely, engrossing medical thriller.... Novak writes with an energy that propels the reader through the novel's unlikely science and subplots. He also winks enough to suggest that this all could be a black comedy on modern parenting."
    Publishers Weekly
  • "Although the phrase 'I couldn't put it down' is used promiscuously in book blurbs (and reviews) it isn't often that I am so caught up in a novel that I have to finish it before thinking about doing anything else. Of course, the pacing and length of a book plays a big role in this phenomenon-once I raced through the first 100 pages of BREED in record time, finishing off another 210 pages was a realistic goal before turning in for the night.... The grabber...is in the set-ups that convince us we are in the 'real world' rather than some phony B-horror movie netherworld. We believe in the people we meet and the place where they live, so when ghastly things start happening, we have to know how the story will play out.... But the increasingly macabre and truly horrifying developments kept me in a vise-like grip.... BREED substitutes science for the religious mythology of Rosemary's Baby so it is, in some ways, more believable than the Ira Levin classic. Maybe too believable."
    Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post

Chase Novak

About the Author

Chase Novak is the pseudonym for Scott Spencer. Spencer is the author of eleven novels, including Endless Love, which has sold over two million copies to date, and the National Book Award finalist A Ship Made of Paper. He has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s. Mulholland Books published his horror novel Breed in September 2012.

Learn more about this author