Kyle Brett
Despite its cultural ties and flashy prose, Alma Katsu’s forthcoming Fiend falls short. When I finished Fiend, I felt like I read a story filled with tissue paper dolls instead of characters. And like tissue paper, this cast of characters was only worth a single use.
For a while, I thought maybe that was the point. That there had to be a reason for such a stunning lack of depth and motivation. Is this a critique of the billionaire class — a book where blind ambition, generational trauma, and power vacuums collide to show readers that dynastic families like the Berishas are impossible to relate to? Is this Katsu at her most political? Or is this about horror being able to barely stand on its own next to the atrocities of capitalism’s corrupting reach?
The more I think about it, though, the more I realize I am trying to make meaning out of nothing.
Fiend follows the Berishas, a dynastic Albanian family who have taken centuries to build an impressive and very evil empire in the import-export business. The Berisha children, Dardan, Maris, and Nora, all vie (in their own ways) for the approval and affection of their aging father, Zef. The company at the novel’s center is horrendous. KPIs are measured in successful murders, cover-ups, silenced whistleblowers, and buyouts.
As for the Berishas, they’re pretty one dimensional. Maris wants it all. Her brother Dardan is crushed under the responsibility of being the eldest child and sole male heir, and Nora, the youngest, is a reformer who falls into drugs and sex. And connecting them is a dark secret.
None of these people are likeable. None of them stand out. None of them go beyond stereotypes. So much so that when one dies under mysterious circumstances early in the book, I felt nothing. There was no pull to understand the character’s death, or real desire to see how the rest of the family would react.
I’ve reviewed two other novels by Katsu on Horror Homeroom (The Fervor and The Deep). I loved Katsu’s The Hunger. I even organized a way for a small group of graduate students to meet and speak with the author virtually. Fiend, however, is lacking so much of what her other books contained: characters that hurt, schemed, loved, hated, and breathed on the page. Absent, too, is the horror that burned slowly, infected readers’ and characters’ minds, and amplified the story; horror that took its time to develop.
Some readers might blame the inspiration of the novel, HBO’s Succession. I do not. The pieces of comparison are there. A family united by their desire for power, a patriarch who is raving, ruthless, and tantalizingly close to gifting control of his empire to his children. A dopey eldest boy. A cunning sister. A sex-obsessed neolibertine. But, Succession had characters you could love to hate, feel bad for, cheer on, and, at times, sympathize with. Fiend is Succession with a dash of supernatural horror, but ultimately without life.
If anything, I blame Fiend’s shortcomings on the need to write something in response to Succession’s hype. Katsu does not shy away from how the show caught her attention and planted the idea for her latest novel:
“The idea for FIEND came to me a year and a half ago (seems longer!) The TV show Succession was ending. I had come late to the party and was binge-watching to catch up. I came to really admire the writing, and then the premise, and—long story short—started to wonder if there could be a story for me there.”
In the same substack, Katsu acknowledges that the Sacklers, along with the idea that these horrible families never see punishment, helped to frame the novel. Marry this with a demonic monster that both protects and destroys the Berishas and you’ve got the makings of a normal, albeit contemporary, Katsu horror story. But that is where the good of Fiend ends: its premise.
Flat characters aside, Fiend is the equivalent of a tight 90-minute film. If you want a page-turner that can be crushed in an afternoon, Fiend’s your book. But I think that speed and lack of character are at the core of my negative reaction. I feel, ultimately, that Fiend is an attempt to follow a popular idea. The Berisha family didn’t need depth to accomplish that task. The demon didn’t need time to breathe. There just had to be enough of the pieces there to make a plot. Readers could consume what was on the page and, when finished, turn to the next piece of content that captures their attention.
But horror only succeeds when there is room for doubt. Doubt takes time. It takes time to think, to question, to speculate, and to blame. Horror requires characters that readers can connect with on some basic level. We have to see ourselves and identify with something in a horrific world, otherwise the genre loses all of its power to terrify — it loses its ability to critique and to liberate.
Fiend proves that horror needs time.
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I received an advanced review copy of Fiend for review from Penguin Random House. The book is set to release on September 16, 2025 and can be pre-ordered here.
Kyle Brett, Ph.D., is a horror buff and avid weird fiction reader. He is the co-editor of Youth Horror Television and the Question of Fear (2024) and currently works as a writer in Development and Alumni Relations at Lehigh University and studies nineteenth-century American literature. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Alma Katsu’s novel, The Deep, It, Cargo, Stephen Graham Jones’ novel The Only Good Indians, and Sea Fever and the working-class weird
