Review: Project Cain by Geoffrey Girard

Summary

Fifteen-year-old Jeff Jacobson had never heard of Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer who brutally murdered seventeen people more than twenty years ago. But Jeff’s life changes forever when the man he’d thought was his father hands him a government file telling him he was constructed in a laboratory only seven years ago, part of a top-secret government cloning experiment called ‘Project CAIN’.

There, he was created entirely from Jeffrey Dahmer’s DNA. There are others like Jeff—those genetically engineered directly from the most notorious murderers of all time: The Son of Sam, The Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy . . . even other Jeffrey Dahmer clones. Some raised, like Jeff, in caring family environments; others within homes that mimicked the horrific early lives of the men they were created from.

When the most dangerous boys are set free by the geneticist who created them, the summer of killing begins. Worse, these same teens now hold a secret weapon even more dangerous than the terrible evil they carry within. Only Jeff can help track the clones down before it’s too late. But will he catch the ‘monsters’ before becoming one himself?

My thoughts

After reading Cain’s Blood (Project Cain’s adult companion novel) I was excited to read Project Cain. I tried to keep my expectations low because I was pretty much going to read the same story from a different point of view. As it turned out this wasn’t necessary. Even if it mostly tells the same story both books are quite different from each other so that I was everything but bored when reading Project Cain only days after I finished Cain’s Blood. (I also think that I made a pretty good choice with reading Cain’s Blood first)

Why I liked Project Cain:

The writing style

Geoffrey’s writing style in this one is quite different and might not be the right one for everyone.
This book is written like its protagonist was looking back at what happened and wrote it down. This means there aren’t a lot of descriptions. Everything is written short and simple and also with indirect speech which can get annoying over time but didn’t bother me personally in this case.

Its interesting POV

I’m always looking out for more books like Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, I’m not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells and I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga. With this one I found one of those. I love to read from a character’s pov who is struggling with becoming the bad guy.
Jeff is also a completely different character from Castillo (Cain’s Blood’s main protagonist) so what’s going on in their heads is quite different. It’s interesting to see how two different characters think about certain situations, how they cope with certain things in different ways.
Jeff also has a potential to be a serial killer and needs to find out for himself who he really is. That itself made him way more interesting as a point of few than Castillo was.

Gripping story

I knew most of the time what was going to happen to Jeff and it was still entertaining.
This book really deserves to be called a Thriller. It’s action packed and knowing what’s going to happen to Jeff made this even more thrilling because I knew what was coming and he didn’t.  And Jeff has to experience some really traumatizing things.

Information about serial killers

This was the part I was most unsure of. I thought this story would contain the same information as Cain’s Blood. But they slightly differ. This made me love this book even more because I’m interested in serial killers and am excited about every detail I get about them.

No horrible details

I love books that describe a murder in all its gruesome details but knew with this being a YA book this would not be the case here. That I liked the lack of those details has too reasons. First it perfectly fits the writing style as in that Jeff wouldn’t want to think about these details and relive these situations in such horrible details. The second reason is that by leaving out even the slightest details out of brutal scenes makes room for my own imagination and makes it even more gruesome in a different way.