“The world is secretly run by demons” is a potent, if predictable, metaphor to unleash on audiences in 2026, but just like any other concept, it’s all about what you do with it, not the concept itself. With The Calamities, his latest massive horror tome, Chuck Wendig decides to view the idea from the inside, creating a kind of horror Succession as a demonic family’s prodigal son returns home.
But even that’s not the end of what Wendig is after here. The Calamities, like many of Wendig’s best books, is a vast machine laden with mythology and secrets just waiting to be uncovered, and along the way, Wendig’s straightforward entry point into the world morphs into an epic laden with monstrous, deliciously menacing energy.
Mourning Mayne is returning home at the behest of his father, the imposing and powerful Hadrian Mayne, for reasons he doesn’t yet know. Born into one of the most prominent “Fiend” (read = humans with ancient demon blood) families in North America, Mourning’s spent much of his adult life partying, trying to stay away from his father’s spiderweb of machinations in world politics, industry, and society. But something is different on this visit home.
Mourning’s father seems different, distracted, and soon Mourning is swept up in a massive conspiracy that threatens the entire power structure of the Fiend families around the globe. With those he truly cares about in danger, Mourning has no choice but to dig deeper into the mysteries of his family, but what he finds will threaten more than just the Fiends.
The very concept of the Fiends, who function as both a global concern interwoven into the halls of power and as a fascinating cross between medieval feudalism and the American Mafia, might be our way into the story, but it’s not the real spine of it. That comes when Mourning’s journey moves outward, away from the Mayne family home and into a vast conspiracy thriller featuring a freelance soul-buyer, a eunuch enforcer in service to one of the smaller Fiend families, an old flame, and a young nonbinary person swept up in dark forces they don’t understand.
Each of these characters brings their own perspective and life to the story, and they add dynamism and warmth to this dark tale, particularly when it comes to the way Wendig builds out his world.
Because our way in to The Calamities is Mourning, who knows all the traditions and lore in which he was raised already, Wendig does not spoonfeed all the rules and hierarchies of this world to us in the form of long exposition drops. Instead, we get to know the world of the Fiends slowly, in a narrative that puts the characters first. Strange new terminology drops into conversation, planted like a dark seed that will sprout and fruit in later chapters. Allegiances emerge slowly, shift quickly, and pivot based on emotional decisions, not necessarily political ones. It’s a great way to lay out a world like this, and Wendig’s ability to lace the book with lore without ever grinding the narrative to a halt for page after page of explanation keeps The Calamities moving.
Through books like The Book of Accidents, Wanderers, and more, Wendig has proven adept at marshalling a vast cast of characters through a story of epic scope, but The Calamities is only the first step of this particular journey. The overall saga, known as The Fiends, will run into a second book, and this installment ends with a hell of a cliffhanger, setting characters off on new paths as larger evils lurk.
That means that, in the grand scheme of the story, this is actually a ramp-up, a long climb to a big reveal that also functions as an addictive introduction to a world and a set of characters. There’s something remarkably intimate about this book, despite the grandness of its plot, and that comes from Wendig exploring, with no reservations, what happens when bad people are trying to do the right thing. Mourning and his friends and allies are literally born this way, their demon blood coaxing things out of them that mere mortals couldn’t dream of, and the choice put to these characters is not whether or not they’ll stay evil or do good, but how they’ll use their gifts in a world that’s already gone to Hell (not quite literally, in this case).
These questions hang over the whole book like smoke, and they infuse The Calamities with even more compelling layers. This is a sharp, witty, absorbing novel from one of our finest genre writers, and it moves like a bat out of Hell.
The Calamities is available August 18 wherever books are sold.
