Never Let Go is a classic gothic horror story. In a good gothic horror story, everything seems perfectly normal. The world is a picture of beauty except for one minor detail that reveals a horror, a terror that is so disturbing that it causes your skin to crawl.

The book is ostensibly about growing up and learning to accept the responsibilities and roles the world has created for you. The story is said in the first person by a 30 something thinking back to the set of events that have lead her to where she is right now. We go back to her childhood, to her teenage years, to her first love to her first explorations of the outside world.

SPOILER ALERT!

Except that she is a clone, whose sole purpose in life is to be harvested for organs so that the rest of the normals out there can live. And that’s what’s creepy. This is the story of how clones grow up to be harvested and killed so that the rest of us can live. And how they learn to accept their lot in life.

What makes the book creepy is that the fact they are clones and what exactly they are created for is never actually revealed to the reader until about 2/3 of the way through. The narrator assumes you know what she’s talking about when she talks about being a carer or when she talks about friends who completed and the fact that she attends operations. What she’s really talking about is that her lot in life is to console clones and ensure that the clones whose organs are being harvested do so without too much fuss. And she seems to be curiously fine with that job.

What makes the book even creepier is that everyone acts as if this is perfectly normal. As the reader your taken aback by the heartlessness of the society that would destroy these living beings so that the rest of us can stay alive. And that in some sense is the point of the book. That in our pursuit of eternal life we are willing to create a meaner world.

In the debates around cloning, stem-cell research etc, Kazuo asks us: if we had to choose between our children and a clone who would we choose? And Kazuo also asks what would the clones do? Could we make them believe that they were serving a higher purpose by being harvested?

At points in the book the clones will scream about the horror of dying, the fear of dying the pain of dying and the injustice of it all, but no point do they protest or run.

The only real limitation of the book is that no one explains why the clones don’t just run. Our narrator has a car, why she doesn’t take her lover, another clone, and just run away.

And that’s the most horrifying part of it all. What if we could teach the clones to want to be harvested so that we could live?

I liked this book. But it does force me to think about choices we make.