Grade: A

The zombie apocalypse is a pretty bleak affair. Not just because of the walking corpses perpetually trying to eat you, but because the entire world has turned on us. The nurturing planet we look to as our home and safe house has become hostile and bent on our destruction, the wonderful concept of humanity being created in god’s own image becomes only a cruel joke. The world has changed, forever, and has removed all hope. All that’s left is survival in the immediate, just a life of going from place to place. But none of this is new, we already knew all that, it’s been done. So how do you make the zombie plague even more soul-crushingly depressing? How about populating the world with drug addicts. In Fiend, author Peter Stenson uses the walking dead as a metaphor for the nature of addiction, in this case meth. The result is a terrifying look into not just addiction, but what people are capable of when survival is the only thing left worth anything.

The book follows Chase Daniels as he comes out of the tail end of a meth bender and, slowly, realizes that the people of the world are dead and have been replaced by zombies. He flees with his fellow tweaker Typewriter as they try to navigate the new hellish world while also trying to stay high. Their addict instincts take them to a cook known as The Albino, then to rescue Chase’s ex-girlfriend KK and her new dude. Things go badly and they flee to the Hmong end of town and hook up briefly with another cook, things go badly there and they flee yet again to find another safe house with yet another cook. These tropes are incredibly familiar within both the zombie genre and the druggie genre, yet nobody, to my knowledge, has ever thought to combine these two things before. Think about it for a second, there are really only two types of people in this world who truly exist only on a moment by moment basis: Drug addicts and those trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Why not throw them together? The big twist on this book is that somehow the chemicals in meth are what keep the zombie plague at bay. This sets up an interesting scenario in that the only way to survive is to stay high. The junkies dream, and nightmare come true.

Fiend is written in the first-person, present tense, creating an immediacy and danger that makes the reader feel the same anxiety the characters feel. Stenson intimately understands the junkie’s mind and, refreshingly, cares little for zombie lore. We don’t know much about the living dead, and we don’t care, because they’re not really the point. His protagonist Chase comes off a little too educated for a druggie dropout, though. He consistently makes literary and classical allusions in his narrative to things like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hephaestus, respectively. These come off a little insincere and seem more like Stenson than Chase. Don’t get me wrong, Chase is intelligent, it’s why we’re able to follow him on his journey despite the horrible and despicable things he does to survive, both before and after the zombie outbreak, but intelligence and education are two different things. This guy would not have knowledge of literary greats and mythical figures.

Zombies terrify us because in them we see what we can become. They’re mindless creatures that only exist for one thing, their next fix. The junkie is obviously the same, and because these two shadows of humanity are all that’s left in the world, this novel contains zero hope. It strips all things good and triumphant away and leaves us with the true nature of the junkie: truly alone, with only their dope to keep them company. The threat of zombies is just one more thing they have to deal with in their quest to get spun. Love and friendship and human connection are only important when they don’t interfere with the procurement of drugs. When given the choice, the junkie will freely enter a world of zombies with no hope of survival just for the vague promise that he might be able to keep getting high for just a little while longer. For an already bleak genre, Fiend is a disturbing, terrifying, and soul-destroying addition.