Customer Reviews

The Experiment

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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.

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

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-.

Stephen Kyle, the author of BEYOND RECALL and AFTER SHOCK has come up with another solid thriller. The book initially takes place in 1945 as Dr. Viktor Schiller has successfully completed a series of experiments in German concentration camps that will allow the accumulated knowledge and experience of the mother to be passed on to their child. However Dr. Schiller believes he has discovered a negative aspect to his experiments-he suspects that the gene he has altered as also deprived the children of having any conscience. In effect he would be breeding a generation of sociopaths. Before he can correct his mistake, the concentration camp is seized by American forces and Dr. Schiller is forced to take the identity of one of his Jewish assistants and flees to New York. From there he attempts to locate and eliminate the remaining survivors of his experiment.

The book then switches to 28 years later (1973) and Dr. Schiller has eliminated all but one of the survivors-Alana Marks and her teenage son. The rest of the book then deals with Schillers efforts to eradicate her and her son and throws in some decent plot twists and excellent background to keep the reader enticed. There were several plot devices that I found to be novel and interesting-mainly that the lead female was employed as a stunt woman and had grown up with a gypsy background. Stephen Kyle obviously did his homework on the gypsy culture and behaviors which gave some extra depth to what could have been an ordinary thriller. That and the relationships between the main characters make this a cut above your average thriller. Additionaly Mr. Kyle does a very admirable job of handling the effect this ability would have on his protagonists and concludes the book in a solid fashion. Very enjoyable