A book about demons secretly running the world, buying souls to feed their grip on power? In 2026? If it sounds a little close to home, however fanciful it truly is, know that Chuck Wendig felt it too when he was writing The Calamities.
“There were definitely times when I was like, ‘The reality in which we live is maybe worse than the one I’m portraying where the demons feel like better people,'” Wendig told Bloody Disgusting from his home in Pennsylvania. “At least they know what they’re up to. They’re aware of the bargains they’re making, and it feels like we’re being run by not only evil people, but also very foolish people, and at least the demons aren’t foolish.”
A hefty tome that launches a two-book series dubbed The Fiends, The Calamities follows the scion of a powerful demonic family – humans with demonic blood, not full-on demons – who rank among the world’s most powerful and influential. Mourning Mayne, son of the powerful Fiend Hadrian Mayne, would rather spend his days partying and blotting out the darkness and intrigue of family life amid a vast demonic hierarchy. But then his father calls him home, setting in motion a chain of events that’s part conspiracy thriller, part horror epic.
New readers of Wendig’s work will find a vast new world of souls and the people who bargain for them, complete with Succession-style drama, Game of Thrones-style worldbuilding, and a modern sensibility that plays heavily on the metaphor of demons essentially running the global economy. For longtime readers, though, The Calamities is something else, a payoff for a series of worldbuilding Easter eggs that litter his past work, including recent horror hits like The Book of Accidents and Black River Orchard.
“I wanted to culminate some of those things together,” Wendig said. “Not in a way that required you reading these other books to understand what was happening here, but I’ve been planting all these weird little seeds, and it was time to see that garden grow.”
Mourning’s return to the Mayne family’s estate might start the story of The Calamities, but it really kicks into high gear when a disappearance sets in motion a search for answers, bringing Mourning back into contact with an old flame, a soul-hunting friend from the Pacific Northwest, a eunuch enforcer from a smaller demonic family, and a young nonbinary person troubled by impossible visions. Together they form a motley crew of mayhem, and if it seems like they’re figuring out the depth of their demonic world as they’re going along, that’s because Wendig was figuring it out, too.
“I built the architecture [of the world] around these characters as I wanted to see it,” he explained. ” I’m hesitant about pre-building a lot of world-building architecture because I think when you do that, you run the risk of being like, ‘I’ve built this beautiful palace, now let’s just run through it,’ but it’s just an empty museum; it’s not really a story.
“The story is really the characters, and ultimately, at the end of the day, the world-building is—I don’t want to say nonessential to the story—but it’s like, even if you don’t understand it all, what is going on with these characters should still be enough to pull you through the piece.”
Once Wendig understood the architecture of his world, though, he leaned into it, introducing readers to demonic broods running Europe, to strange minor families lingering on the periphery, and even to the entire mythology of the Fiends (his name for the demon-blooded humans), complete with quotes from esoteric tomes that don’t exist. These quotes, which open each chapter, stand side-by-side with real quotes from real thinkers, songwriters, and more, adding a layer of verisimilitude that also keeps readers guessing.
The deeper Wendig got into the story of the Fiends, the bigger The Calamities became, until it was clear that one book would indeed need to expand into two, with plenty of room for other stories set in the same world down the line.
“When we sold the book I had this story in mind, but then it was clear that I couldn’t do it in one,” Wendig said. “There’s just no way. It was definitely ‘Split it in half and make it a twofer.’ The question then is, if these are things that people really like, the world is something I could revisit if it becomes interesting to them and interesting to me, but I don’t know that that’s on the table as yet.”
The Calamities, even as a standalone book, is expansive, thanks in part to Wendig’s preference for writing multiple character perspectives interwoven throughout. But the book also grows thematically as it continues, challenging the reader to root for characters who aren’t necessarily good, and who might yet become less good as the story goes on. Demons run the world, yes, but it’s never as simple as good vs. evil.
“It’s also just about the levers of power and what happens when people get it and what it does to you and how you start to view other people as just resources and just something to be used and discarded as opposed to another person, and how families lever that power against their own members,” Wendig said. “Then [I was] really trying to get a little squishy with it and not just have it be like ‘Power Bad.’ What are all of these sort of axes and angles going into and what does that do to these people? ‘Nothing good,’ is the answer,” I think.”
The Calamities concludes with a major new revelation for its characters and its world that will set the second book on a different path, with new threats, new thematic concerns, and new horrors for readers. Wendig can’t say much about the second novel yet, of course, but he did offer that, if you like the morally grey darkness of the first book, you’ll probably be into what he has planned next.
“Someone asked me, ‘I’m dying to see how the characters are going to change. Will they get better?’ Well, the one thing I can tell you is I think the book doesn’t immediately go to obvious places, and it leaves the characters in a place more of descent than climbing out of the hole,” Wendig said. “I think the book starts with them digging deeper. These are horror protagonists who are doing horror things more than they are doing hero things.”
The Calamities is available now wherever books are sold.
