Montana Stayer’s “The Subject and the Scientist” is the definition of a book that a reader either loves to hate or hates to love.
The physical book has an attractive, albeit bland cover depicting grays and whites that gives away nothing of the raw emotion held within but still remains fitting of the subject material.
The book is short, sporting only 225 pages in the softcover version. The text on each page is well spaced out and comes in quick paragraphs that further shorten the actual content of the story. The short, self-published story follows the unnamed Scientist, a father struggling with grief over the death of his young daughter, Evelin, years prior. He is joined by the Subject, a child he created as an almost exact clone donor body in an attempt to save his daughter.
Following the Subject’s creation, the Scientist was surprised to find she had consciousness but ultimately decided he would kill her in order to save his daughter.
Unfortunately, he was too late, losing his daughter and, in his mind, getting stuck with the thing made to save her.
Years after his daughter’s death, the book begins with the Scientist keeping the Subject locked in a basement room as an “experiment.” He usually meets with her daily, following a strict routine of asking three questions and leaving.
Over the course of this arrangement, the Scientist has done his best to keep an objective view on the situation, but often finds himself lashing out at the Subject. He wants to blame her for his daughter’s death and reasons throughout the story with himself that his daughter should be the one alive, not the experiment he never expected to have a life.
Despite his coldness to her, the Subject consistently holds onto hope that she can build a relationship of some kind with the Scientist. She struggles with understanding why he treats her like he does, but continues to take care of her. It is made clear in the story that the Subject is still only a curious child that is searching for happiness in life.
The concept of the story itself is intriguing. It focuses entirely on its titular characters isolated from the rest of an unknown world in the woods at the Scientist’s house. The dynamic of the two characters has dashes of a “will they, won’t they” cliche, but in the sense of will the Subject and the Scientist find a way to live in harmony despite the pain they bring to each other or will they always hurt the other in their own way.
This is where the main problem of the story arises. The ending is very inconclusive, leaving the reader wondering what comes next. While it does fit the story that came before it, it still feels very unsatisfying and leaves the reader with the question, ‘what does any of it matter then?’
By the end of the story, it seems as if the Subject and the Scientist have had little growth, despite the potential for it being there throughout their numerous interactions. Every time they talk, it feels like one step forwards and one step backwards.
Outside of this, the story has a sort of television-like quality where it tends to rerun the same ideas over and over in the text, as if reminding the reader what happened an episode ago. While this might be no issue in a longer narrative or in a weekly TV show as mentioned, for a story this short it becomes sadly redundant and takes away from the new developments that do arise in the text.
This is especially true with sections throughout the story of the Scientist recording video logs for himself that summarize everything that took place over the last few pages. These moments can make the reader wonder what was the purpose of them reading the events if they would just get a condensed version at the end of the section.
In place of this repeating focus on events the reader just witnessed, it would be nice if these summarizing spaces were used to provide insight into the background of the world of the Subject and the Scientist and answer questions such as how the Subject was made, what happened to the Scientist’s wife, and how has the Scientist maintained the life he has without any known income?
Overall, the story is compelling, packed with emotional moments, and full of potential. However, the unfortunate lack of needed character growth, background information, overabundance of repeating information and lackluster ending takes away from the reading experience as a whole. Due to this, on a scale of one to five stars, this story only gets two stars.
Photo by Emma Crouch
