Photo by Matt Mendelsohn
Alma Katsu is the author of the new novel Fiend. Her other novels include The Hunger. She lives in West Virginia.
Q: What inspired you to write Fiend, and how did you create the Berisha family?
A: At the heart of Fiend is the Berisha family, a family of legendary success and status with a company that’s been around for a thousand years.
Maris is the middle child, willful and driven. She sees herself as a much better pick to lead the company than her brother Dardan, the eldest and only son. When she decides to try to convince her father to change his mind and pick her, she kicks off a battle royale within the family.
Complicating matters is the rumor that the Berishas’ success is due to more than their business savvy. Anyone who crosses the Berishas suffer terrible fates. The rumor is that the family is aligned with a diabolical protector. But that can’t be true. This is the 21st century. We don’t believe in superstitious stuff like that anymore.
Fiend was inspired by the cultural moment we find ourselves in, where the rich are idolized, greed is good, and no one seems to mind how you made your fortune. It asks the question, can anyone with great wealth really be innocent?
It’s also the story of what happens when a patriarchy is challenged—very much a story for our time.
Q: Reviewers have compared Fiend to the TV series Succession--what do you think of that comparison?
A: Succession was definitely an inspiration. Funnily enough, when I first watched the TV series, I didn’t like it. The privileged, bickering characters were a turn-off. But as the series was winding down, I tried it again and loved it. The writing, especially in the final season, was terrific.
The Roy family in Succession was modeled after media moguls the Murdochs and so the takedown had to do with the way they manipulated the news industry to their benefit.
In my story, the family’s evil is more omnivorous. Fiend zooms in on the three children and shows how they became the kind of people who can let a friend die right before their eyes or wipe out an entire village without the slightest bit of remorse. It shows how they were shaped by their family and, most importantly, the secret at the heart of the family that keeps them in power.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Fiend was that rare (for me, at least) story that came to me all at once. The only difference is that originally Maris was a much more sympathetic character but I quickly saw that wouldn’t work, as she was too reactive. The story is propulsive and needed an active main character.
A major choice I had to make was how to handle the Protector. I wanted readers to continually question whether it exists or whether it serves mainly to give the family plausible deniability for its wrongdoing. It’s meant to make us think about the nature of wrongdoing. Of evil itself.
Q: The writer Tananarive Due said of the book, “Alma Katsu reveals the monstrosity of power from every ugly angle, with plenty of scares and surprises.” What do you think about that description?
A: I love it! That is, essentially, the point of the story: question what you think you know about people in power, people who present themselves as above reproach, people to whom everything has been given. Chances are that you don’t know their whole story.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve got a couple books in the works but more immediately, I have a story in the recently released anthology The End of the World As We Know It, stories set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand, with an introduction by King.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Fiend is my ninth novel. I also write spy thrillers, drawing on my long career as an intelligence analyst with your favorite three-letter U.S. spy agencies. The best way to find out more about my works or to find out what’s coming next is to subscribe to my newsletter, which is on Substack. (almakatsu.substack.com)
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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