Author: Geoffrey Girard
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
I review the companion novel to this one, Cain's Blood here.
Based on CAIN XP11, which according to wikipedia ran as four installments in a publication called Apex Digest in 2007, Project Cain is a YA novel set in the not-too-distant future which is paired with Cain's Blood a more mature novel about the same subject and which I shall review directly after I've read this.
A word on genetics. I don't know where Girard thought he was going by proclaiming that "gene xp11" has anything to do with serial killers or is some sort of 'anger' gene. Anyone who knows anything about genetics will also know that a single gene is rarely acting alone and rarely specifies a trait such that a change to that one gene will completely change that trait, which makes the mutant gene in X-Men absurd, of course. There are such genes, but more regularly, genes operate as part of a gene network which is tolerant of an occasional mutation, but yes, it can be disrupted, too. I know that xp11 has been implicated in renal cell carcinomas, for example.
The gene does appear on the X-Chromosome (hence the 'X' part of the name), but the one Girard refers to is actually not xp11, but xp11.3, gene ID 4128, as is shown in this map from Vanderbilt. This section does affect monoamine oxidase A, as Girard says, but it's not known as the anger gene but as the warrior gene, and wikipedia expressly argues against Girard's plot point in that, while MAOA does appear to have a connection with antisocial behavior, it has: "...had no statistically significant main effect on antisocial behavior. Maltreated children with genes causing high levels of MAO-A were less likely to develop antisocial behavior". Quite the opposite of Girard's premise! Note that Girard is writing fiction and can write whatever he wants, of course, but my point here is that if he's going to get into genetic details, then he needs to do a better job than he's done.
So, Project Cain is a military-funded research project whereby the DNA of serial killers is taken and cloned, so the military can raise a series of children who would grow to be deadly killers and therefore invaluable weapons. It's brain-dead, of course, because they can never replicate the circumstances of the childhood of those serial killers. They can try to emulate it, but this is not the kind of scientific experiment you can completely control - to say nothing of the appalling ethics of such a scheme. But this story focuses on one such clone, named Jeffrey Dahmer. Kudos to Alexander for taking the bizarre if gutsy step of making a serial killer (who's not Dexter Morgan) the hero of his story! It;s rather sad that he completely ruined his starting point by making Jeffrey the most irritatingly whiny-assed teen ever created by a fiction writer. For this alone I want tor ate this novel warty! This kid is endless nails on a chalk-board, which I guess is evil enough....
But having said that I have to ask: honestly? This story makes no sense at all, even assuming that, say fifty years from now, genetics would be advanced enough that cloning could be carried out with both a high rate of reliability and at reasonable cost! Why? The military already has trained killers, and they’re free! They're the volunteers who routinely sign-up for military service, and who are professionally trained with weapons. Some of these people are trained to be very deadly, extremely skilled, and highly efficient. They're called Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs.
How would a serial killer (who is highly specific about the targets he is willing to prey upon, all of whom have to have some real meaning to him) be of any advantage whatsoever in a military conflict? They would be as likely (if not moreso!) to kill their fellow soldiers as they would the enemy. From what I've read, most of them can only work alone, they need to get up very close and personal with their victims, and many of them want to be caught. I can’t imagine (unless the mission specifically called for it for some clandestine reason), that any soldier, and especially not a Ranger or a Seal, would want to be caught in pursuing their duties. I's sincerely hoped that Girard had much more than this to offer, but it did not look that way at all by chapter fifteen at least.
Other than that complaint, it is technically well-written for what that's worth. To be fair, Jeffrey does have some reason to be the way he is: his dad, who seemed superficially to be a decent, if somewhat remote dad, came to him one night and gave him a thousand dollars and warned him to stay away from DSTI - the corporation his father worked for. Then his dad left. Jeffery couldn’t find him anywhere. He came home to find people in dark suits hauling everything of interest - including every personal thing of Jeffrey's - out of the house. Jeffrey slept overnight in the emptied house, but was captured there the next day by a man called Castillo - the subject of the other book in this pairing.
Castillo isn't friend of DSTI either. He's ex-1st SFOD-D, and he informs Jeffrey that twelve kids were killed in a nearby boys' institute, with six more missing. Every one of those six was a cloned serial killer: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, another Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish, Henry Lee Lucas (who may have been actually wrongfully convicted and who had his death sentence commuted by George W Bush), and Dennis Rader. Castillo takes Jeffrey for a ride-along to try and track down these kids - as well as find Jeffrey's dad.
Well, I reached chapter 15, and frankly, I'm ready to drop this novel like a not best seller, because I am so infinitely-SICK-and-freaking-TIRED of the whiny-assed self-pitying Jeffrey boundlessly, ceaselessly, constantly, endlessly, interminably, everlastingly, and self-perpetuatingly complaining about how miserable his lot in life is, and how everyone hates him, and how he's got nothing to expect, nothing to look forward to, nothing to hope for and nowhere to go, which is coincidentally exactly< how I feel about this novel right now! Actually, at this point, want Jeffrey to run into the six escaped serial killer clones and be hung, drawn, and quartered. I really do. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs, it's the best thing for him really, his life is going nowhere! I detest this self-obsessed brat.
At the end of chapter 14, which was long past my due date, as rotten as I felt having read that far, I thought that just maybe there was going to be a sea-change, because as he was wandering self-pityingly around the motel trying to get into any room other than his, he saw a woman's body on a bed - with the face painted into a doll mask. Now he doubts his sanity. That's perfectly fair, because I honestly doubt mine for even reading as far as I did in this novel. But rather than have this tediously slow novel take off at that point, the very next thing which happened was that this worthless excuse for a teenager started right back into the whining again.
The deal was that I'd read these two novels consecutively. Scratch that. I am now starting on the other of the pair, hoping that that one is better than this one. When I catch up in that one to the point where I am in this one, then I'll try to read them concurrently and I'll try to finish them both, but I'm making no promises about either one of them, having suffered my brain cells being serially killed from the crap I had to wade through in the first fourteen chapters of this novel!
I finally decided to call this one - or more accurately, these two. After wading through pretty much the same pointless boring crap in the other one that I'd already waded through in this one, I could neither stand to read any more of that one, nor face coming back to the whiny teen in this one, so I decided to return them both to the library. Maybe someone else can benefit from them. I certainly can't; not when I have over a dozen books on my reading list on the right there, all of which offer a promise that neither of these books seems able to deliver on! This one goes down as a warty!
