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?
