Incarnate by Alma Katsu: A chilling techno-horror take on The Picture of Dorian Gray

The most frightening thing about Alma Katsu’s Incarnate isn’t the deepfake technology, the violence, or even the possibility that an artificial person might become more real to the world than the person who created her. It’s the realization that the world social media creates around us may already be an illusion—and that we are remarkably willing to believe it is real.

Incarnate is Katsu’s modern reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray, transplanted from the world of decadent Victorian society into the age of influencers, deepfakes, and artificial intelligence. Dorothy Wagner has spent her life wanting to be seen. When she takes a job with a brilliant visual effects artist whose company is developing cutting-edge deepfake technology, she discovers a way to turn that desire for recognition into something much bigger. In secret, she uses her employer’s technology to create Isabella, an impossibly beautiful girl who takes social media by storm.

But Isabella’s success isn’t entirely Dorothy’s doing. A mysterious presence online offers Dorothy the fame she has always wanted and seems to have the power to make it happen. The entity tells her early on that there will be a price to pay eventually, but it will decide what that price is later. It’s a distinctly Rumpelstiltskin-like bargain: Dorothy gets what she wants now while agreeing to a debt whose terms she won’t know until the time comes to pay.

For much of the story, Dorothy is trying to hold together everything she has created. Isabella becomes increasingly successful, Dorothy’s secret becomes increasingly difficult to protect, and the mysterious bargain hangs over everything. The tension comes from watching Dorothy try to maintain control of a situation that is steadily becoming more complicated than she ever anticipated. And that is where Incarnate becomes particularly interesting.

One of the things that stood out to me most about this story is how thoroughly Dorothy and the people around her inhabit a social media reality that feels much larger than the actual world outside it. There is a sense throughout the novel that everybody knows about influencers, everybody cares about what happens online, and everybody understands the importance of the latest viral sensation. Except, of course, they don’t.

That struck me because social media has a peculiar way of convincing us that everyone else is seeing the same things we are seeing. I remember how Twitter used to feel like that. You didn’t even have to be a Twitter user yourself for it to seem as though literally everyone was on Twitter. Every news story, argument, joke, controversy, and political development seemed to be happening there. And every news outlet reported on what was happening there. Then you would look at the actual numbers and realize that the platform represented a much smaller portion of the population than it appeared to. Its prevalence was nothing but an illusion.

The same thing happens on other platforms now. According to Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey of U.S. adults, about half of Americans use Instagram. That is a huge number of people, but it also means that roughly half of American adults don’t use Instagram at all. Among younger adults, however, usage is considerably higher. That means the younger you are, the more likely it is that you live in this illusory world that is completely out of touch with the real world. This matters when we’re talking about the world of Incarnate.

I am, admittedly, one of those people who spends far too much time on social media. I have literally had to put a block on my phone to shut it off after a certain amount of time every day. If I didn’t limit myself to an hour of social media a day, I would probably be on it constantly and would never get any reading or writing done. So, I’m not reading Incarnate as someone who doesn’t understand the appeal of social media. Quite the opposite. I understand it very well.

And yet, while reading the book, I found myself wondering who the major Isabella-type influencers are right now. I couldn’t think of anyone beyond the book influencers whose accounts I’ve encountered over the years, so I turned to Google to find out. Turns out, I had never heard of a single one of the most influential influencers online today. That isn’t because those influencers aren’t famous. They’re enormously famous within their particular corners of the internet. That’s the point. Social media doesn’t give us one shared reality. It gives us millions of tiny realities.

The algorithms are extraordinarily good at dividing us into these little self-contained worlds where we see more and more of the things we already care about. Within my own corners of Instagram and Threads, it can sometimes feel as though everyone knows the same books, authors, arguments, references, and obscure pieces of literary trivia that I do. There are the people who already know everything and the newcomers who are there to learn from us. It’s easy to assume that everyone in the world is part of this online ecosystem.

And then I walk out into the real world and encounter people who have never heard of half the things my carefully curated feeds have convinced me everybody knows. Incarnate understands that phenomenon extremely well. In many ways, that illusion is the real horror at the center of the novel.

Social media makes everything we see there feel more important than it necessarily is. A post with millions of views feels important. A person with millions of followers feels important. A controversy that dominates your feed can seem as though it has consumed the entire world. But then you step away from the screen and find that most people in the real world have no idea what was trending this morning (unless you only surround yourself with people who follow all the same social media accounts you follow.)

That disconnect is essential to Dorothy’s story because Isabella becomes enormously important within the reality that Dorothy has created. Her popularity is measurable. There are numbers attached to it: followers, views, engagement, attention. Those numbers make Isabella’s existence feel objectively significant. But what do those numbers actually mean? And what happens when the person controlling those numbers begins to believe they represent something more profound than they actually do?

Dorothy gets to experience both sides of the illusion. She encounters her greatest hopes when Isabella becomes everything she dreamed she could be. She also encounters her greatest fears as that carefully constructed fantasy begins to threaten her own life. The result is a story about what happens when the imaginary world we’ve created begins to exert very real power over us in the real world.

That sense of remove extends beyond the way Dorothy understands social media. It also shapes the way she experiences violence. Even when something horrific happens—even when someone is killed—the scene can feel strangely distant. As a reader, I sometimes felt as though I were watching the event through a social media reel rather than experiencing it alongside Dorothy. There is a detachment to the violence that could almost seem like a stylistic choice to soften its impact. I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

Instead, I think the distance is part of what Katsu is doing with Dorothy’s character. Dorothy herself seems to experience the online world with a much greater visceral intensity than she experiences anything happening in the physical world around her. The digital feels immediate and consequential to her. The real feels strangely muted.

That makes the violence more disturbing, not less. Dorothy can be confronted with something objectively horrifying, yet her emotional relationship to it can feel almost mediated, as though she’s watching something happen on a screen rather than living through it herself. Meanwhile, the success of Isabella—the comments, the followers, the attention, the constant stream of digital affirmation—can feel more immediate and emotionally real to Dorothy than the people and events physically in front of her.

---

---

In that sense, the novel’s narrative distance mirrors Dorothy’s psychological distance from reality. We aren’t always experiencing events with her because she isn’t always experiencing them in the same way we would. Her online reality has become more vivid than her physical one. That may be one of the most unsettling ideas in the entire novel. The danger isn’t simply that social media can distort our perception of reality. It’s that, eventually, the distorted reality might feel more real than reality itself.

Dorothy is also a more complicated character than the basic premise might suggest. She has been bullied. There is mention of a mysterious incident from her childhood that makes us wonder if she has a history of instability. Not to mention the dead younger brother whose absence seems to affect only Dorothy’s mother. Dorothy has spent much of her life wanting desperately to be noticed. She has artistic talent, but she hasn’t been rewarded for it in the way she believes she deserves. By the time she creates Isabella, she is already carrying a lifetime of resentment, insecurity, and ambition.

And then she starts doing things she probably shouldn’t. The interesting thing is that for a long time, I didn’t particularly want to condemn her for them. Part of that is because Dorothy’s actions exist in an ethical gray area that feels surprisingly familiar. She takes files from her employer’s technology and uses them to create Isabella. Technically, yes, she’s stealing. And yes, I understand the argument that anything she creates using her employer’s resources belongs to the employer. But I also kept thinking about the way employers sometimes exploit employees.

I’ve experienced situations where I was expected to do work at a much higher level than the employer was willing to compensate me for. And Dorothy is not some random employee stealing something from a company that has treated her fairly. She is – according to both herself and her boss—the company’s most valuable employee, yet she is paid the least. Plus, most of the work she does on Isabella happens after hours, so how much claim should her employer have to work that she’s doing “off the clock?”

Where exactly is the line between what belongs to the employer and what belongs to the artist when the employer expects the artist’s life to revolve around building their business? If you create something using knowledge and skills you developed on the job, does that belong to the company forever? If you use your employer’s tools to create something on your own time, does the company own the result? What if the thing you create is substantially different from the original material? The lines become increasingly blurred when the employer is so quick to blur the lines between their time and the employee’s personal time.

Incarnate doesn’t offer easy answers to those questions, and I’m glad it doesn’t. Because Dorothy’s situation becomes especially uncomfortable when you consider why she is doing what she’s doing. She’s not simply trying to get rich. She’s trying to build a future for herself knowing that her employer’s business might be made irrelevant by artificial intelligence within the year. And even her boss has told her that she needs to look out for herself because no one else is going to look out for her. Dorothy is trying to take control of her own life. That doesn’t make everything she does right. But it makes it very easy to understand. How far would you go?

That’s what makes Dorothy so compelling. For much of the novel, you can find yourself rooting for her even while watching her slide into increasingly questionable behavior. She doesn’t suddenly become a monster. She takes one step. Then another. Then another. And each step makes the next one easier.

That’s a particularly effective way to build horror because it forces the reader to participate in the moral calculation. At what point would you stop supporting Dorothy? When she takes the files? When she creates Isabella? When Isabella becomes famous? When Dorothy starts lying? When somebody gets hurt?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question is this: What if the thing you created could make you rich and famous? How far would you go to protect it? The question becomes even more complicated because Isabella isn’t simply a piece of software sitting on a computer. Dorothy has created something that appears to have a life of its own. The more people believe in Isabella, the more Isabella takes over Dorothy’s life—and her real-life body.

That is where the comparison to The Picture of Dorian Gray becomes particularly effective. Oscar Wilde’s novel is concerned with beauty, desire, corruption, and the consequences of creating an idealized version of oneself. Katsu takes those ideas and puts them into a culture where beauty can be manufactured, reproduced, optimized, distributed instantly, and consumed by millions of people before breakfast. But now, the portrait has become an algorithm.

Incarnate also raises questions about artificial intelligence without turning into a simple argument for or against it. That was one of my favorite things about the book. The novel is clearly interested in the dangers of AI and deepfake technology, but it doesn’t need to stand on a soapbox and tell us what we’re supposed to believe. Instead, it puts Dorothy into increasingly complicated situations and lets us think about the implications ourselves.

And those implications go far beyond the technology itself. As Dorothy’s creation becomes more real to the people around her, the novel begins to ask harder questions about ownership, identity, and responsibility. Who owns an AI-generated creation? What does it mean to create something that looks like a person but isn’t one? What happens when millions of people become emotionally invested in something that doesn’t actually exist in the way they believe it does? And perhaps most importantly, what happens to the person who created it?

Those questions become more disturbing because the technology in Incarnate doesn’t feel particularly distant. Deepfakes, AI-generated images, virtual influencers, algorithmic recommendation systems, and increasingly sophisticated digital personas are already part of our world. Katsu isn’t inventing a completely imaginary future. She’s taking things that already exist and pushing them toward their logical—and horrifying—conclusions. That makes the horror feel considerably closer to home.

What I liked most about Incarnate is that it doesn’t really need to convince me that social media is dangerous. I already know it is. I’m the person who has to put a timer on my own phone because I know perfectly well that I will keep scrolling if something doesn’t stop me. What the novel does particularly well is explore why we keep coming back. We want to be seen. We want to matter. We want other people to admire us. We want to know what everyone else is doing. And perhaps most dangerously, we want to believe that the world inside our screens is the world that actually matters.

Dorothy takes those desires to their extreme. She creates someone who embodies everything she thinks people want to see, and then she watches that creation become more successful than she ever was. Isabella is beautiful in precisely the way an algorithm rewards. She is endlessly visible. She is perfectly constructed for attention. And yet the more successful Isabella becomes, the more Dorothy has to give up to maintain the illusion.

That’s what makes Incarnate such an effective modern reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The technology may be new, but the desires underneath it are ancient. We still want beauty. We still want attention. We still want power. We still want to escape the limitations of our ordinary lives. The internet has simply given us much more powerful tools for doing it. And, as Dorothy discovers, sometimes the things we create to fulfill our fantasies have a way of becoming much more real than we ever intended.

If you’ve ever fallen down a social-media rabbit hole and suddenly realized that your carefully curated online world doesn’t look anything like the world outside your phone, what do you think that says about the reality we’re creating for ourselves? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Incarnate by Alma Katsu releases September 22, 2026. An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Join the conversation

If you love books that stay with you—and enjoy thinking about them long after you’ve turned the final page—subscribe to get new literary analyses and writing tips from Write on the World!

Related Content

• Ancient technology freed humanity—Modern tech keeps us trapped (Write on the World)
• Read more books about influencer culture! (Write on the World)
• The unexpected delights of being a Jeopardy clue (CrimeReads)
• Interview with an author: Alma Katsu (Los Angeles Public Library)
• Alma Katsu: Making history fun, relevant and a little bit spooky (BookTrib.)

Now available in print and on Kindle!

Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.