From beloved horror maven Alma Katsu comes a terrifying reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray for the internet age.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Incarnate by Alma Katsu, which releases on September 22nd 2026.
Beauty doesn’t fade. It feeds.
Dorothy Wagner has spent her whole life wanting nothing more than to be seen. But after failing to make her mark as an influencer, she takes a job working for a brilliant coder whose company is focused on cutting-edge deepfake technology. And there, in secret, is where she creates her salvation.
Isabella. An impossibly gorgeous girl who takes social media by storm. Dorothy’s artistry is brilliant, and Isabella seems so real that she garners millions of followers. But everybody knows overnight success doesn’t just happen. And when someone gets a little too close to the truth, a violent confrontation sends Dorothy on the run, forcing her to confront what she’s willing to sacrifice to keep her secrets.
A modern reimagining of a classic tale, Alma Katsu’s Incarnate is an illuminating, haunting tale of algorithmic worship and beauty that can kill.
EXCERPT
one
ten years later
I won’t be in your hair for too long,” Dorothy promises as she hauls her suitcase over the doorway. She is staying in the condo of Marta, a friend of a friend of her mother’s, the only person they know who lives in Los Angeles. Her place is only about an hour’s commute to Tomas Delgado’s studio, a miracle in the traffic-choked city. There is no way Dorothy will be able to afford a car payment and rent, not on what she will be earning.
“Yeah, no problem,” Marta says and follows Dorothy into the cramped living room. “I know what it’s like in the beginning. This is, like, my good deed for the year-pay it forward, right?”
Dorothy will sleep on Marta’s couch while looking for an apartment. Marta is in her early thirties, working as a stylist while hoping for her break as an actor. She is very pretty but seems to be just not quite pretty enough to get picked for parts, at least to Dorothy’s eye. She also strikes Dorothy as being kind of cynical and tough-minded, though who is Dorothy to say? She has just started following her big dream, while Marta has been working at it for a decade, spinning her wheels working a station in a salon, inhaling fumes while watching other actors get parts she auditioned for. That’s probably what living in L.A. does to you after a while.
“So, this guy you’re gonna work for, you’ve never met him?” Marta asks as she takes a drag of a cigarette, the sliding door to the tiny balcony open, which only serves to blow the smoke back into the apartment.
“No, not exactly. But we’ve been corresponding for over a year.” Dorothy sets her suitcase on an empty patch of floor. It looks like she’s going to literally be living out of her bag, as she can see no place to store her things, and Marta hasn’t offered her so much as a shoebox. She feels terribly out of place, like an intruder, even though she gets no hostile vibes from her host. It’s all almost too much-the cross-country flight, her first time in Los Angeles, the strangeness of the West Coast with its palm trees reaching for the open, empty blueness of the sky. It’s so unlike her home in northern New Jersey. It’s like she’s ripped her life open and shaken out everything that is worn and comfortable, and now she is waiting to see what her life will be.
And it starts with this stranger’s cluttered, messy place.
“So . . . you ever think about giving up and going home?” Dorothy asks.
Marta jerks back, spilling ash on the floor. “Why would I do that?”
Dorothy sees immediately that she’s been rude, a bad habit of hers. You’re too blunt, her mother has told her on more than one occasion. You could stand to be nicer to other people. Not everyone sees things the way you do. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . . I guess I just assumed if you came here to act . . .” And you’re still cutting hair, you must suck. There’s no good way out of this.
“Why should I go back? L.A. is my home now. All my friends are here.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”
Marta’s turns to leave, the air chilly. “You’ll see. It’s not so easy.”
Is it true that Dorothy doesn’t know Tomas Delgado? It’s more complicated than that, but she doesn’t want to explain it to Marta. It’s not important anyway. It’s not like they’re going to be roommates for long. Dorothy’s tired of explaining the situation to people, to her family, her college adviser, her friends. To everyone else it seems crazy that she would move across the country, to a place she’s never been and where she knows no one, to take a job working for a stranger starting his own business. “Maybe wait awhile,” her mother, Teresa, suggested. Dorothy usually feels that her mother is on her side, but this time was different. “No shame in playing it safe. It’s smart. Why not work for your uncle Freddie for a while, while you wait to see if this man’s business finds its feet?”
“Oh, Mom, you don’t understand the VFX industry. You have to get in on the ground floor.” She doesn’t know if that’s true, though. Dorothy’s chosen field, visual effects, is a foreign planet to her parents. She comes from a family of teachers and mechanics and, at best, middle managers, the kind of jobs that are easy to wrap your mind around. They don’t trust anything to do with the entertainment business. It all seems shaky and shady to them, a risky way to make a living. Nothing you’d entrust with the happiness of your offspring.
Sure, it would’ve been better if Dorothy had gotten a job with an established studio like Industrial Light and Magic, a place that average people had heard of, but those jobs are few and far between. “Everything in L.A. is about who you know,” one of her professors said when she asked for career advice. You had to be there, get into circles of people in the same profession, and then the opportunities would come.
But this job fell into her lap.
Like everyone else in the world with a cell phone, Dorothy had been captivated by the videos of NotJessPerry. The clips featured a man who looked like action star Jess Perry but wasn’t, at least that’s what the creator, known only as Tomas, claimed. He had no reason to lie, and besides, there was no way a nobody could afford to hire Perry, one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
She remembered the first video vividly. There on the screen was her favorite actor replicating the latest dance to go viral on TikTok. The sinuous moves, sly winks, fancy footwork. Only . . . Jess Perry didn’t dance. This fact was well known. He’d said in interviews that he could sing-though it was nothing special-but he’d lost acting jobs because he had two left feet.
And yet here was the handsome actor, adored by hundreds of millions, looking like some kind of pop star.
Buried in the text accompanying the video was the ironic hashtag #NotJessPerry.
A few weeks after the first video came a second. In this one, Jess Perry was doing regular, everyday things. Eating a Popsicle, changing out of a sweater, speeding by on a motorcycle. He spoke this time, and it was undoubtedly Perry’s voice, the same voice Dorothy knew so well from TV and movies.
More videos followed. They showed the star doing what were, on one hand, mundane things: changing his clothes, talking to people on the street. But the point was to prove that Tomas’s manipulation of the media was flawless. Something as simple as having a character pull a half-zip anorak over his head, for instance, presented difficulties for any video-editing software; that Dorothy knew from the classes she took for her college degree. The seconds when the clothing obscured Perry’s face presented two chances to mess up, for the seams between real and fake to show.
By then, the videos had gone viral. They had been the object of speculation in countless posts. Wired ended up breaking the story that these videos featured not the actor Jess Perry but an AI video created by an unknown visual effects artist, Tomas Delgado. Tomas worked for a small effects studio in New York City, doing grunt work on video games and straight-to-streaming movies. His Jess Perry deepfakes were his own creations, he explained in the Wired interview, a challenge he gave to himself. The second video was designed not to stun the general public, like the first one, but to impress his fellow professionals. It featured situations that were notoriously hard to pull off, typically times when the programs would glitch and reveal that there was some digital prestidigitation going on. “The people who do this for a living know that I’m doing real honest-to-God magic here,” he told the Wired reporter.
After that interview, everything blew up for Tomas.
Dorothy spent hours poring over the videos, going frame by frame, trying to find the seams and theorizing how Tomas had pulled it off. Whatever his method or software, it was light-years better than what she was learning in class, which bugged her. She had no illusions that the college was giving her little more than glorified training for an entry-level job, but for that amount of money at least they could try to approach something more current.
Finally, one evening, her vision blurry from hours squinting at the screen, she decided to contact Tomas. Normally, she would never be this forward. She never tried to contact celebrities, not like some people she knew, desperate to reach out to their idols. She wasn’t sure Tomas could be considered a celebrity, anyway, though she kept an eye on his follower count and it was steadily clicking upward on every platform.
This was different. She wasn’t trying to meet a celebrity. This was professional interest-not that she would dream of asking him how he did it, how he made the magic. She was just going to tell him how much she admired his work and leave it at that.
Looking back, she realizes it was unlike her. She thought she’d learned her lesson early on: No one really wanted to connect with her on social media. The few connections she’d made with strangers fizzled out into nothing. The only thing anyone was interested in was using other people; once they saw that you had nothing to offer besides one more “like” or “subscribe,” they moved on.
At the same time, she’d been conditioned to feel that she had a relationship with the people she followed. She knew from her communications class that such delusions were called “parasocial relationships.” It was the rush of intimacy fans felt for the idols they followed on social media. All those photos and videos and posts gave you these glimpses into their lives and created the illusion that you were friends. “But those aren’t real lives,” the professors had stressed in their lectures. “Those are pretend lives, created precisely to give the illusion of closeness.” This was the dark art at the heart of their chosen profession, the teachers emphasized. For God’s sake, use it ethically.
Dorothy’s classmates had hooted at their professor’s presumption. Our generation grew up with social media, they countered. We know better than you that it’s make-believe.
That’s what they thought, anyway. Dorothy wasn’t so sure.
She decided to ignore their advice and write to her idol. Tomas Delgado had been able to accomplish exactly what she wanted to do: prove herself to the world. From the Wired interview and everything she could find out about him online, Tomas was an otherwise unremarkable young man from Queens. He was twenty-nine years old, on the slight side, not particularly handsome. His family worked blue-collar jobs, just like Dorothy’s. He had no relations in the creative arts, let alone in television or movie production. In other words, in another timeline, a different plane of existence in the multiverse, Tomas Delgado could be her. She could be Tomas Delgado.
So, before she chickened out, Dorothy sent him a DM:
Hello, my name is Dorothy and I’m a student at Montclair pursuing a VFX degree. I just want to tell you how much I admire your work. I feel like I’m looking at the future when I watch your videos. I wish they taught something like it here, but my professors aren’t even aware of your work or how it has the potential to change the industry.
It was, she knew, a childish thing to say, obviously pandering to his ego. But it was the truth. She just wanted to express her admiration. She didn’t want to be one of those people who asked for career advice and came off sounding like they were looking for favors-or worse yet, asking a complete stranger for a job. She pressed the “send” button before she chickened out.
The next morning, she was surprised to see a message back:
Nice to meet you, Dorothy. It’s nice to be noticed by someone else in the field. They won’t teach anything like this in your college program because what I’m doing is truly cutting edge.
The last bit stung a little. This is what happened every time she tried to connect with another person: There was always some kind of backhanded dig or subtle put-down. You are not my equal. The sting was overshadowed by elation, however: He had written back to her! He, a somebody, had recognized her, a nobody. Happiness swelled in her chest.
He probably expected their exchange to end there. He was merely being polite. Common sense told her to leave it at that, but she decided to extend herself. To risk seeming needy. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Can you suggest things I should study on my own? New software? Creators I should be following?
Dorothy couldn’t believe when, later that day, there was another response from Tomas:
If you’re really interested . . .
She expected a link to a course he was selling. Master classes, a subscription service, even private consultations. That was the name of the game, wasn’t it? Income streams, the gig economy. She was pleasantly surprised when, instead, he listed a half dozen YouTube accounts (most of which she already knew about, she was happy to see) and linked to a couple of discussions on Reddit that she hadn’t been aware of. After spending a few hours online chasing all this down, she texted back, thanking him for his generosity.
Over the next few weeks, Dorothy came to learn quite a bit about Tomas Delgado. He lived in New York City and had been working in the film industry in VFX for about seven years. She found a few pictures of him on his Instagram and Facebook accounts showing a slight man in his late twenties, his wiry black hair pulled back in a ponytail and his jawline accented with a wispy fringe. He usually wore sunglasses but in a rare shot with them off, his eyes looked kind. He didn’t seem to like to post pictures of himself. Instead, there were mostly pictures of his world. City streets, friends hanging out in a bar, and his workplace, a studio somewhere, his workstation cloaked in darkness. The table itself was littered with tiny figurines, empty cans of energy drinks, and crumpled Post-it notes. The typical life of a VFX artist, the job she hoped to have one day.
As she watched his follower count grow, she wondered why he bothered to continue to chat with her, worried that he might have an ulterior motive or that he might be hiding some dark, unsavory proclivities. He had over a million followers now on TikTok and nearly as many on Instagram, and the numbers grew by leaps and bounds every day. He confided that he was getting courted by businessmen who wanted to turn his techniques into something they could sell to the film industry. Producers were approaching him with ideas for collaboration. He was being thrust into a whole new world but still found time, in the wee hours of the night, to text with a college student. She imagined it might be because he liked being admired and that it was satisfying to have someone like her, a never-ending, nonthreatening source of praise. She would never compete with him, would never be able to surpass him.
Excerpted from Incarnate by Alma Katsu. Copyright © 2026 by Alma Katsu. Excerpted by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
