Fiend
Historical horror maven Alma Katsu turns her talents to the modern world for the first time, in this terrifying tale about an all-powerful family with an ancient evil under its thumb.
"If you liked Succession but think it would have been a lot more fun with a 1,000 year old demon, then Alma Katsu's Fiend has got you covered." —Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
Imagine if the Sackler family had a demon at their beck and call.
The Berisha family runs one of the largest import-export companies in the world, and they’ve always been lucky. Their rivals suffer strokes. Inconvenient buildings catch on fire. Earthquakes swallow up manufacturing plants, destroying harmful evidence. Things always seem to work out for the Berishas. They’re blessed.
At least that is what Zef, the patriarch, has always told his three children. And each of them knows their place in the family—Dardan, as the only male heir, must prepare to take over as keeper of the Berisha secrets, Maris’s most powerful contribution, much to her dismay, will be to marry strategically, and Nora’s job, as the youngest, is to just stay out of the way. But when things stop going as planned, and the family blessing starts looking more like a curse, the Berishas begin to splinter, each hatching their own secret scheme. They didn’t get to be one of the richest families in the world without spilling a little blood, but this time, it might be their own.
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Community Reviews
This is a weird and, unfortunately, I think unsuccessful book.
The premise has promise: "what if Succession, but demons?" Sure! I can hang with that!
But it almost entirely fails to deliver, in my view largely because of the inexplicable pacing problems. I would say 95% of the "action" in this book takes place in the final 5-10% of the pages. This is a lean little novel, and yet it's chapter after chapter of languid, slow buildup until suddenly BAM event-event-event-reveal-twist-the end. There's barely any plot in here, but rather the scaffolding on which a plot might be built except uhhh...whoops. We forgot to finish that part.
There's a sort of half-hearted pass at trying to create some sort of mystery or tension with the central conceit, which is almost laughably undone by the unfortunate pacing and action compression. I'm not exaggerating here when I say: about 15-20 pages from the end of the book, you get new info that theoretically could make you rethink and recontextualize everything that has come before, except that as soon as you turn the page to the next chapter, you get into a dialogue where a character just straight-up explains everything and then that's that. The end! Book over.
The characters are all thinly drawn and very much feel like an exercise in simply checking off the key stereotypes: Mean Dad, Wild Child, Reluctant Heir, Grasping Middle-Child. I don't have any objection to characters playing certain roles, but I do object to a book that squanders any opportunity to give them any real depth or interiority, while using most of its page count on a banal running recap/play-by-play of their daily lives.
More than anything else, this feels to me like a draft - an underbaked and unfinished kernel of a novel that needs another few passes to more fully flesh out the ideas at play. I'm honestly surprised this made it to print in this shape.
(crossposted from my Storygraph review.)
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