I read Alma Katsu‘s latest novel, Incarnate, in a single sitting. I had to, not just because Katsu is a writer of brisk, clear prose with a knack for thriller pacing, though she is. No, I had to because I simply had to see if Katsu would have the guts to push this book as far as its early pages teased.
I was not disappointed.
A book that emerges first as tech horror, then morphs into body horror, then morphs into something else entirely, Incarnate is a dark, prismatic dissection of the themes at the heart of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s also thoroughly contemporary, soaked in the reality of our daily waking nightmares at every turn, and one of the most entertaining horror books you’ll read all year.
Dorothy has spent much of her life on the periphery, always just out of sight of the people she most wants to see her value. Bullied as a child, she’s grown into a talented young visual effects artist who’s talked her way into a job with one of the field’s fastest rising stars. At Dorothy’s new job, she learns not just how to create realistic digital renderings of people, but how to make entire digital twins, fully formed characters who can sound and look like any celebrity willing to pay for such a creation.
As she plays around with the technology, Dorothy decides to experiment and create not just a twin, but an alter ego, an ethereal, gorgeous young woman she dubs Isabella. A few quick social media experiments later, and Isabella’s a celebrity, the biggest new influencer of the moment, the person Dorothy’s always wanted to be.
But such things have a price, and that price is what makes up the bulk of the horror in Incarnate. The deeper Dorothy gets into her time as Isabella, the more she seems to lose herself, both physically and psychologically. She realizes she’s done things she can’t remember doing, that her clothes fit strangely, that her coworkers are growing more and more suspicious about her seemingly sleepless existence and her late nights in the studio. If you know the Dorian Gray story, then you know the most basic progression of a story like this, but what makes Incarnate work is the way Katsu cleverly bifurcates the narrative.
In one thread of this novel, you have Dorothy, the shy dreamer who would rather blast music into her headphones and work behind a monitor than really relate to her coworkers. When the Isabella thing takes off, it’s thrilling for Dorothy, right up until she realizes that in order to keep up the facade of Isabella’s reality, she’s going to have to work harder to put herself out in the world and ask for the things she wants. Following along as she deceives her way through life as an incognito influencer is great fun, but it also establishes that we’re dealing with a person whose self-worth is so distorted by years of neglect and mistreatment that she can barely see who she truly is anymore. For Dorothy, a transformation is actually necessary, even if what happens in this novel isn’t what she planned.
Then there’s the Isabella narrative, which still unfolds from Dorothy’s point-of-view, but fills in the thematic flourishes from the other side of the portrait, if you will. Isabella is, like so many things we find on the internet now, made of pixels, not cells and molecules. She’s data, she’s imagery, she’s lines of code, but through Dorothy’s fascination with her creation, then amplified by the public‘s fascination with her, she becomes something more.
Metaphors start to emerge, simple at first, like the idea of the masks we wear when we’re on social media. But as Katsu develops the thematic underpinnings of this story, it takes on more meaning. It’s a story of masks and parasocial relationships and computed hallucination, yes, but it’s also a story about the horror of realizing you’re not who you’re meant to be, the terror of rebuilding yourself.
It’s about the price we pay to be seen, not just in a shallow, attention economy way, but on a very human level. This book is thrilling and clever, and moves like a rocket, but it’s also deeply empathetic horror storytelling, and that gives it even greater weight.
Incarnate is available in stores now.
