Books: Peter Stenson’s “Fiend”

After finishing Fiend, I can honestly say that it is one of the few books I’ve read that has made me want to take a shower immediately afterward.

Having said that, I want to make it clear that this is not a criticism. It’s a testament to the strong writing ability of Peter Stenson, whose debut novel is nothing short of a horror tour-de-force that is equal parts Requiem for a Dream and Dawn of the Dead. Fiend tells the tale of Chase Daniels, a drug addict who comes out of a days-long meth bender to discover that the world has been overtaken by a zombie apocalypse. Over the course of the novel, Chase, his friend “Typewriter,” and an assortment of other meth-addicted characters move from place to place in and around the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, their survival and battles with the walking dead determined by one thing: their incessant need for meth and the paraphernalia needed to make it.

Much like Ania Ahlborn’s The Bird Eater was one of the scariest haunted house novels I’d ever read, Fiend is one of the scariest zombie novels to have entered my reading radar, and is heartbreaking to boot. Stenson’s descriptions of the zombies are viscerally frightening and disturbing, considering their nakedness and the way they giggle before they start tearing into you. Fiend doesn’t scrimp on the use of zombies for allegory, either. Like Robert Kirkman’s characters in The Walking Dead, Stenson’s protagonists are much like the undead themselves, surviving but not really living, either, since their existence relies on the quantity of meth they have at their disposal as well as the amount of ammunition necessary to obtain it.

That being said, the descriptions of meth addiction and what it does to people are a large part of the emotional core of the novel. Stenson himself was a meth addict at one point (my hat is off to you, Mr. Stenson, for ten years’ sobriety, and I hope the rest of your years see you and yours in good health and life), and the hallucinatory nature of his narrative provides not only an explanation for why Chase and his friends weren’t all that aware of the world going to hell around them at first, but also explains their motivations for what they do. They aren’t all that concerned about bathing, eating, or sustaining themselves through means other than the meth. The meth is all they care about – everything else is secondary, as evidenced by the multiple lists that Chase makes in the book for what he and his friends need to survive. Their clothes are dirty, their bodies are malnourished and skinny, and the places where they shelter are filled with trash, grime, and dirt. It’s an existence that is made all the more hellish by the presence of the giggling hordes of zombies shambling around outside, waiting for victims to make themselves known.

While I could have done without the multitude of sexual allegories, a lot of which seemed unnecessary, Fiend is a book that zombie fans will snap up greedily, and will also provide thoughtful insights into drug addiction and the effect that it has on the addicted. Peter Stenson’s future novels will certainly be on my reading list in the years to come.