Fiend by Peter Stenson

Published by Crown on July 9, 2013

Although I'm convinced the world doesn't need another zombie novel, Fiend twists the genre in an interesting way. The title could refer to zombies, or it could refer to the dope fiends who are the novel's protagonists. They were metaphorical zombies, spending their lives "walking that thin line between suicide and preservation," even before a plague killed everyone and began reanimating corpses. Fiend is about living as a drug addict more than it's about zombies, but it may be necessary these days to add zombies to a novel in order to get it published. In any event, zombies are always good for a laugh, and the early chapters of Fiend offer some very funny moments. At the same time, an addict's misery isn't funny at all. Peter Stenson makes it feel raw and real. The metaphor, addict as zombie, is apt and effective.

Two meth addicts, Chase Daniels and Typewriter, think they're hallucinating when they see a little girl disemboweling a Rottweiler. They flee after a violent encounter with the girl. The world seems to have emptied itself during the 168 hours they were busy getting high. They eventually realize that only meth addicts survived the plague. Fortunately for Chase, his ex-girlfriend is still an addict and still alive. Chase is determined to find her, but his more immediate mission is to find more meth.

Chase is the novel's narrator. Meth is "the one and only constant" in his life, his reason for living. Part of the novel is Chase's eloquent love letter to drugs. "Yeah, they demand a lot of attention and effort, but their love is legendary, their compassion endless." His description of addition, his need to get high and his revelry in the result, the pain he caused his family, the devastation of his life, is compelling and convincing. His anguish in some of the novel's more violent moments is touching.

I love Chase's descriptions of his friends, particularly Albino, who lives in the woods and cooks meth. Heavily armed and seriously paranoid, Albino has the best chance of surviving because "he's that guy, the one who thought people were coming to slit his throat since he was old enough to crawl." Chase watches his ex-girlfriend make a speedball and thinks about "all the things that caused her to use her skills and deft hands for the mixing of drugs instead of transplanting kidneys."

Maybe drugs will kill you, but in Fiend not having drugs will kill you, and that's what sets Fiend apart from other zombie novels and from other "my life as an addict" novels. Can meth addicts -- "outcasts, the people America wants to pretend aren't walking the street" -- create utopia, as Chase imagines in his highest moments? Can the addicted do anything to advance the survival of humanity? Maybe they're just another kind of zombie, but they need to try, because "a junkie without hope is as good as dead."

Stenson writes with real power. Some scenes are brutal, and not just those involving zombie violence. The strongest scenes involve characters trying to deal with each other, to cope with their own insecurities and weaknesses. Fiend asks whether zombies are any more dangerous than frightened, living humans, but zombies are really just a vehicle that lets Stenson tell a larger story: the story of what it means to be a flawed human being, as are we all. Because of its creative use of zombies to tell a story that isn't about zombies, I consider Fiend to be one of the best zombie novels I've encountered.

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