The Page 69 Test: "Fiend"

Monday, September 15, 2025

"Fiend"

Alma Katsu's novels include Red London, The Fervor, Red Widow, and The Deep. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she had a thirty-five-year long career as

a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies, including the CIA and NSA, as well as RAND. Katsu is a graduate of the master's writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University. She lives in West Virginia with her husband and is a contributing reviewer for the Washington Post.

Katsu applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Fiend, with the following results:

From page 69:
Maybe Zef assumed Dardan would keep the other boys in line. But Dardan wasn’t a leader, not of this pack. He was just one of the boys at the periphery. Grateful to be part of the tribe. Conner Garrison—a god on the lacrosse field, the one the girls could not refuse—was the undisputed star of that little universe.

Dardan always burns with shame to remember that part.

He’s always felt guilty for what happened. He knows Zef is to blame for many things, but Conner Garrison’s death is not one of them.

Dardan’s shoulders slump. “I’m sorry but you just have to accept it for what it was: a freak accident. We were night skiing. We shouldn’t have been. We didn’t know the trails well enough. We were stupid. Egging each other one. Conner lost control.”

Garrison is almost trembling with rage. Dardan knows he wants to push back: Conner was an expert skier. There’s no way he would’ve done something so foolhardy. And lose control? He’d practically grown up with skis strapped to his feet.

But Andy Garrison wasn’t there. Dardan was. And he’s plunged back to that night. Following Conner’s screams though the trees and over boulders to the bottom of a sheer drop. Kneeling in the bloodied snow, not knowing what to do, fearing it was hopeless anyway. Headlamp sputtering in and out, running out of juice. Praying while he waited for the medics to show up. Conner unresponsive by the time he heard the medevac copper landing in the distance.

There is something else, too. Something Dardan has admitted to no one else save his father.
Page 69 is not a good example of the book as a whole; that is, it doesn’t reflect all the themes and key issues in the book, but it does give the reader insight into one important part of the story, that of Dardan, one of the major characters.

Here, Dardan is looking back at an incident that happened when he was 17. He’s 28 now and being groomed to take over his family’s empire. From this one scene, you get a sense of the many pressures facing Dardan—his strong, exacting father, the pressure that comes with being part of an extremely wealthy family—as well as a sense of Dardan’s character and, most importantly, his limitations.

Crisis is a good test of character. Being the only person on the scene of a deadly accident, the victim ostensibly a good friend (or maybe more of a frenemy) lets us see exactly what kind of person Dardan is. Most importantly, we know a challenge lies ahead of him and we see through this scene that he is not equal to that challenge. Like his frenemy Conner, he’s going to be crushed—we just don’t know yet how.