The Experiment [Mass Market Paperback]

Stephen Kyle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2003

Dr Victor Schiller is conducting experiments in genetic manipulation with the intention of helping humanity. But when he starts to fear that the technology he has invented may instead breed a race of super-killers, he escapes and vows to destroy his human test subjects - and their offspring.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This haunting thriller from Kyle (After Shock, etc.) revolves around experiments performed in Nazi concentration camps. The story opens in 1945 with SS medical officer Dr. Viktor Schiller in a frantic race to beat the American troops to Otzenhausen, the camp holding the female prisoners he used in his genetic experiments. His visions of bettering mankind by enabling knowledge and memories to be passed from mother to child has gone bad and instead given rise to a mutant gene that causes its carriers to be born without a conscience. When the camp is seized before Schiller can eliminate the last child bearing the gene, he takes the identity of a Jewish doctor and flees to New York. Nearly 30 years later, Schiller, now a successful neurosurgeon, finds Alana Marks, the daughter of one of his victims, and her teenaged son. To stop the gene from being passed from generation to generation, he must eliminate them both, a job made more difficult by the fact that his son is romantically involved with Alana. A contrived conclusion disappoints, but Kyle keeps the cinematic action scenes and nail-biting suspense rolling throughout.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (January 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446609447
• ISBN-13: 978-0446609449
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1 x 6.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,995,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an exciting thriller, January 8, 2004

By 

Sarah Hayden (Ellensbur, Washington USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Experiment (Mass Market Paperback)

I really loved reading The Experiment. It is a real page turner. I found its combination of real historical events and fiction made the book more appealing to me. The Experiment is about a highly respected doctor who masquerades as a Jewish Hollocaust victim of a Nazi concentration camp. The man is really a Nazi, but calls himself Jewish in order to save himself from being punished from the war crimes he has commited. He finds out the the experiments that he has been carryingout on pregnant prisoners has dangerous side effects if the child the woman is carrying happens to be male. The doctor's experiment is this he had come up with a way for mothers to pass on their knowledge to their children. This means that their children would know every experience that they have ever had and every fact they ever knew. Once he had discovered this horrible side effect he one by one killed off all of the women and their babies to prevent this terrible experiment-gone-wrong from spreading. He managed to kill all of his patients but one mother and child and another baby girl. The rest of the book is spent detailing his quest to find his final three patients and their offspring(if any) and his troubles trying to stop this gennetically passed nightmare.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars exciting thriller, January 18, 2003

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Experiment (Mass Market Paperback)

In 1945, Nazi research scientist Dr. Viktor Schiller knows he must destroy his work before releasing a genetic abomination on humanity. He genetically experimented with three female prisoners in an effort for their offsprings to accumulate the knowledge of the mother. However, the results prove dangerous as he erased what makes a person human and instead bred a subspecies of killers. He travels to Oztenhausen Concentration Camp to kill the three females, but two of the subjects survive along with the infant daughter of the one he kills as the Americans arrive. Viktor takes over the identity of his Jewish friend, Heinrich Knelmann.

Viktor moves to America to live as Heinrich. He moves in with Heinrich's son and sister, posing as a psychiatrist. Over the years he kills two of the subject-carriers and is down to two people to clean up his mistake. One is a 1950s offspring whom he plans to turn into a vegetable. The other is that World War II infant that escaped him. He has finally been tracked down as a stuntwoman. Soon he will rectify the blunder he brought forth on humanity.

THE EXPERIMENT is an exciting thriller that hooks the audience because the Nazi experiments during World War II make the theme plausible. The ensemble cast seems real, but especially Alana and her flashbacks to her mother living in a World War II concentration camp. However, the tale belongs to the obsessed German research scientist. Viktor, unlike Victor Frankenstein, tries to take responsibility for what he believes are the horrors he has unleashed on the world yet never stops to see what the true results are.

Harriet Klausner

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars undistinguished thriller, December 30, 2002

By 

David Group (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Experiment (Mass Market Paperback)

Here we go with another Nazi project that has repercussions decades later. Despite the somewhat interesting nature of the experiment and the inclusion of gypsy culture, this seemed a curiously bland novel. The bulk of it takes place in the '70s, but I got little sense of the time period, and the references to movies and songs of the time seemed forced. The action scenes were a bit cliched (since one of the characters is a stuntwoman in the movies, I would have thought this would have come more into play). I think the novel could have used a little trimming, too, as for me it did not get going until the last hundred pages or so. And I question whether any scientist of the World War II era would have had the knowledge or equipment to have performed the experiment described in the book. The ending was also weak and unsatisfying; it also takes place in 1986-- couldn't he have taken it another fifteen years into the future? Overall, a C-.