Lifestyles of the Rich and Fiendish

Emy Manini faces Alma Katsu’s demons while reading her newest novel, “Fiend.”

By Emy Manini December 11, 2025

• SF

ALMA KATSU’S LATEST NOVEL, Fiend (2025), follows the fortunes of the powerful Berisha family, which controls “a company that rivals Koch Industries and Cargill.” They rule from atop a Midtown Manhattan high-rise that bears their name in “giant, glittering letters,” an image of oligarchic dominance we don’t have to struggle to find examples of in cities around the globe. This is the kind of sprawling, predatory company that is dogged by rumors of bribes, ruthless cruelty, and an amoral code of ethics.

Fiend has already earned comparisons to the HBO series Succession (2018–23) and, were it more similar to that show, the striving and machinations of the three siblings that make up this nest of vipers would be the focus of the plot. But in Fiend, there is another player: the titular silent partner in the evil and chaos that follows this dynasty through the generations, an uncanny presence that guarantees the clan’s success at the expense of any and all who would stand in the way of their fortunes. This blessing (or curse?) makes the novel feel closer in spirit to Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)—loosely inspired by several of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories—with its supernatural elements and a dual timeline that periodically revisits the siblings’ shared childhood to sprinkle clues to the family secrets along the way.

Television shows and films that portray generational privilege as a poisonous inheritance are an appealing guilty pleasure in a context of widening wealth disparity, where many Americans are one hospital visit away from bankruptcy. It is ever more evident that oligarchs wield inordinate power over politics—so much so that pundits are forced to engage with whether billionaires should even be allowed to exist. If, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asserts in his 1996 essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” the monster is born “as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment,” formed out of our anxieties and desires, then the fiend in Katsu’s novel certainly arrives at an opportune time.

At not quite 300 pages, Fiend contains less research and detail than Katsu’s other, more historical horror novels. Her best-known, The Hunger (2018), about the brutal realities of the settlement of the American West, added a monstrous contagion to help explain and deepen the horrors faced by the historical Donner Party. The Deep (2020) tackled the sinking of the Titanic and its lesser-known sister ship, the Britannic, again by intertwining tragic history and supernatural creepiness. In contrast to those novels, Fiend is sparse and modern, employing direct language and imagery. As a result, it reads as even more allegorical, with its up-to-the-minute themes of greed, power, and monstrosity.

The novel follows Maris, the (as she sees it) underappreciated and mostly unloved middle child of the clan. Maris is eager for her father, Zef, to rescue her from her cushy but pointless job as “Special Adviser to the Chief of Strategy” and bring her into the inner circle of power within the company, where she can replace her hapless brother Dardan, whom she sees as being far less deserving of his position.

Early on, the company faces a crisis when a whistleblower is set to testify before Congress about the government bribes the family has been doling out to facilitate a merger. On the morning of the scheduled testimony, however, news reaches the board that the whistleblower has been found dead, an apparent suicide; his death nonetheless bears traces of a violence that suggests he was helped along in hanging himself. To Maris’s surprise, she finds that her immediate reaction is not only relief but also genuine happiness. She senses an opportunity to bond with her father over what she thinks are his shrewd “business” decisions to eliminate threats through traditional, albeit illegal, means. The truth that she doesn’t know, and of which Dardan is painfully aware, is that there are otherworldly forces protecting their family and brutally punishing those who stand in their way.

Maris idolizes and fears her father, an immigrant from Albania who was able to take his considerable inherited fortune and make it even greater in the United States. Zef is, however, a complicated man who, due to his uncontrollable rages, has had to separate himself from his family, visiting them only once a week for dinner. All of his children crave his meager attention, though they also fear his darker side, a brooding aspect that indeed can come across as fiendish. Periodically, Zef entertains members of his far-flung Albanian family who come to him to beg for favors, Godfather-style, as leader of his ancient clan. Seeing these supplicants come hat in hand, heads bowed in respect, thrills Maris even more because it represents a power that she is herself denied.

The Berisha family is a stand-in for the kind of dynastic wealth that consumes the lives of those born into it while smoothing the way for each member, practically guaranteeing a life of “success” from the moment of a very fortunate birth. But Fiend is also a portrait of strictly patriarchal authority, which prioritizes masculine leadership and dominance in all things. The Berisha family company and its secrets have been handed down to first-born sons for generations without exception, since before the family emigrated to New York. The value of the family’s women comes from serving as the useful vessels that produce the favored heirs. They are thus judged not for their capabilities but for their beauty and genetic purity (all the children must marry Albanians to keep the line “pure”).

Unfortunately, Maris is doubly disadvantaged, being both female and less attractive than her old-world beauty of a mother and her party-girl sister Nora, both of whom are “willowy,” with hair that turns blonde in summer. Maris resembles her father. She is “solid,” “swarthy,” with “eyebrows like overgrown hedges,” adding not only a gendered disadvantage but a racialized one as well. Maris has ambition and drive, but in a world where having what it takes to be powerful can be boiled down to male birthright, she is aware that she will have to break things to get where she wants to be.

The secret to the Berishas’ success is buried in a story young Maris is told by an Orthodox priest, a revenge tale rooted in the old country that has followed the family across continents. The monstrous power that is attached to the family parallels the separation and isolation their wealth and fortune make them feel from the rest of humanity, bringing an ancient folk magic to modern Manhattan. From their penthouse apartments, the Berishas don’t concern themselves with the suffering of others, or the effects of their business dealings on their employees and the public at large. Maris’s striving is seen as no less monstrous than her father’s absolute power to control fate—perhaps even more so since she must reject her “natural” feminine inclinations to pursue her goals. As the novel progresses and the corpses pile up, the reader is invited to consider the nature of monstrosity.

Is an inhuman being to blame for the terrors that befall the perceived enemies of the Berishas? If so, does that exonerate the members of the family who live a luxurious life paid for by the suffering of others? The answer is clearly no. Though pragmatic Maris rarely feels sympathy for the other members of her family, the reader is gently given the opportunity to do so. Zef is a tortured patriarch, living alone in a chilly mausoleum of a house that gives visitors the feeling of being surveilled. He is alternately fearsome and pathetic, bearing the weight of family history and the horrors he has witnessed, as well as responsibility for his company’s actions. Dardan struggles with the secret knowledge only he has been afforded, and he understands the burden of following in his father’s footsteps. Nora wastes her life on drugs and sex as the forgotten third child. Maris will never be recognized as the “killer” in business that she thinks she is, simply because she was born a woman. The novel details, through a sardonic lens, the pitfalls of being born a Berisha, and the narrative allows for the reader to feel the same levels of pity for them as they demonstrate for those beneath them—that is, not much.

Early on, we witness Maris’s insensitivity when she takes pleasure from the death of the whistleblower. But even when the bloodshed hits a little closer to home, Maris still struggles to feel empathy. She begins to wonder if this makes her a monster, if not for refusing to conform to her role as baby-maker and support to her male superiors, then for lacking human feeling for even those closest to her. As a child, Maris is obsessed with an illustration torn out of a picture book, a drawing of the half-human Minotaur from Greek mythology whose freakish aspect and haunted eyes inspire some feeling in her since it is doomed to be imprisoned in the labyrinth, so close to the world of humans yet closed off from it. It is not until she learns that the monster feasts on human flesh that her sympathies falter. After all, she knows that only “a true monster eats its own kind.” Still, she is not sure whether to be repulsed by such a creature or to go on admiring it.

Maris is, in short, drawn to the bloody, otherworldly power of her family, even as she is uncertain where the consequences will take her. As the body count rises, Katsu’s novel proves itself a cool and engaging literary treat that allows readers to imagine a world where the superrich are made to face the monsters within.