Book Review: Fiend by Alma Katsu
The Berishas run a behemoth of an import-export company, a company whose enemies have an unfortunate habit of dying in mysterious circumstances.
Maris, the middle of patriarch Zef’s three grown children, is increasingly frustrated at being pushed aside when it comes to the family business. Her younger sister Nora is not interested in the boardroom shenanigans, but her older brother Dardan – next in line to his father’s throne – gets to be in on all the exciting meetings. With Zef an old-timey sexist, Maris doesn’t seem to have a chance at ever leading the company, however much she’s shown herself to have more of the cut-throat nature required than her brother. She’s told that whoever her husband is (bear in mind, Maris is currently single) would have more of a right to lead her family’s company.
Dardan understands her frustrations. But he also knows something she doesn’t: the reason why all the enemies of Berisha find themselves meeting terrible ends. It terrifies him. He wants it to stop. Yet any efforts to do so risk putting his own head on the chopping block…
If you have watched – or frankly even heard of – Succession, then it’s hard to read Alma Katsu’s latest book without that hit HBO series springing to mind. Zef Berisha has all the unyielding gruffness of Logan Roy, unwilling to change his way of doing things, always putting the family business above his actual family. Although the gender and number are flipped, the fighting between the Berisha kids is frequently reminiscent of Kendall, Shiv and Roman’s boardroom battles.
The publicity for Fiend has leaned hard into the comparisons, with even Katsu herself populating her Instagram page with Succession memes. But the thing is, when you are comparing your book to one of the richest and most-well written TV shows ever made, it raises expectations to an unsupportable level. Here, it also overloads the focus. In Succession, the narrative meat comes from the boardroom tussles, and how they affect the various members of the family. In Fiend, the focus is also on how those tussles affect the family, and the way serve as the backdrop for the demon that sits in the shadows of their business. It’s a lot of material to throw at a slim horror volume. And as such, all the different areas feel a little too overstretched to have real nuance or much texture – the corporate dealings are a bit generic, the characters are too archetypal, and we don’t get nearly enough time with the demon (the passages where we do are by far the highlights).
Still, despite the general substantive thinness, the book itself is an entertaining, pacy read. Katsu’s prose finds an engaging middle ground between atmosphere and narrative sleekness. Her plotting is tight and twisty, and bolstered by an ending that’s difficult to see coming. Though it won’t linger long in their head afterwards, a reader could quite easily rocket through the whole of Fiend over one enjoyable afternoon.
★★★
Fiend is published by Titan Books on 24 September 2025
