'Breed' review: Novak's created a monster

BREED, by Chase Novak. Mulholland Books / Little, Brown, 310 pp., $25.99.

Halfway down page 50 of "Breed," there's something so disgusting and weird and ominous that it immediately makes you forget you've spent 49 pages waiting for it to get good. The novel's premise is scary enough to get you that far: A couple seeks out an unorthodox medical solution to their childlessness and ends up both fertile and horribly changed; 10 years later, the kids are growing up terrified in a creepy old Upper East Side brownstone where the parents lock them in their rooms at night -- or perhaps lock themselves out.

I wish I could say that author Chase Novak (the pseudonym of two-time National Book Award finalist Scott Spencer) finds his footing after that first scare, but he never quite does. For one thing, there's the book's lazy preponderance of brand names, price tags and antique provenances. One character goes about clad exclusively in Turnbull & Asser shirts, and at one point "shards of broken plates and glasses crunch beneath the leather soles of his Crockett and Jones oxfords."

There's also the occasional twinge of real carelessness, such as the use of the solecism "stepped foot" for "set foot." One character has an apartment filled with "videos that await returning." Not DVDs -- videos. Perhaps some blame should rest at the editor's feet, but you'd think a guy with serious literary credentials might try harder in his first genre outing.

There are passages during which "Breed" is really visceral. The kids are chased around Manhattan for a significant portion of the book by one of the scariest monsters I've encountered in a book. But there's just not enough content here for those terrifying moments to make the rest of the book worth the effort. Novak leaves interesting plot threads unresolved but revisits dull ones; he frequently drops in lazy caricatures, including a gay couple composed of an Upstanding Citizen No Different From You and his boyfriend, Sexy Latin Tramp.

Moreover, any one aspect of the book's central conceit can be picked apart with a minimum of effort. How does the terrible treatment work? Why hasn't the weird behavior of the victimized parents gotten them arrested? How is it that hundreds of parents have undergone the treatment without ever checking back to see how their recommending friends were faring?

When highbrow authors' forays into genre succeed (Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" comes to mind), it's because they understand how vital the art of world-building is to the process of writing speculative fiction. If there's not a sturdy, reassuring foundation of interlocking ideas beneath a novel about aliens or demons or dragons, the reader will almost always make his way through the book -- if he finishes at all -- dogged by unwilling skepticism at every turn.

That skepticism is the most persistent monster chasing the reader through "Breed."