Nessie Review ☆ Fiend

Fiend by Peter Stenson
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: July 9th, 2013
Source: Library
Date Read: 3/18/15 to 3/22/15
295 pages
Rating: ✰✰✰✰

There’s more than one kind of monster.

When Chase Daniels first sees the little girl in umbrella socks tearing open the Rottweiler, he's not too concerned. As a longtime meth addict, he’s no stranger to horrifying, drug-fueled hallucinations.
But as he and his fellow junkies soon discover, the little girl is no illusion. The end of the world really has arrived.

The funny thing is, Chase’s life was over long before the apocalypse got here, his existence already reduced to a stinking basement apartment and a filthy mattress and an endless grind of buying and selling and using. He’s lied and cheated and stolen and broken his parents’ hearts a thousand times. And he threw away his only shot at sobriety a long time ago, when he chose the embrace of the drug over the woman he still loves.

And if your life’s already shattered beyond any normal hopes of redemption…well, maybe the end of the world is an opportunity. Maybe it’s a last chance for Chase to hit restart and become the man he once dreamed of being. Soon he’s fighting to reconnect with his lost love and dreaming of becoming her hero among civilization’s ruins.

But is salvation just another pipe dream?

Propelled by a blistering first-person voice and featuring a powerfully compelling antihero, Fiend is at once a riveting portrait of addiction, a pitch-black love story, and a meditation on hope, redemption, and delusion—not to mention one hell of a zombie novel.

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To be honest, outside of The Walking Dead comics I've never really read much zombie fiction. I thought it was cool and provided an interesting background to test humanity and morality and stuff but I never really got too into the whole genre. But look at that summary! An addict making their way through a zombie apocalypse? That's something that I'd definitely heard of or imagined before so I had to check it out.

So the plot has the same straight forward as any other other zombie story--survive. The one key difference is that in addition to food, water, shelter, and guns, our heroes need meth. Throughout this book meth is their number one priority, which is makes sense. Literally the first thing Chase and his friend Typewriter do after figuring out that the end of the world is really happening is drive to their dealers house to see if they can find some meth.

They are so focused in their drive for this drug that we never really learn more about the outside world, and why all this is happening, and the state of everywhere else. We do learn that these zombies are called Chucks because they laugh when they are trying to kill you. But that's really all, nothing about what caused it or anything. However, that didn't bother me at all. That's because it made sense that the characters wouldn't know since they are just concerned about getting their next fix.

This book is written in present tense, so it moves pretty fast but it works. It's even a bit stream of consciousness-like at some points, it's actually really cool to be in the mind of a drug addict like that. Also one thing I liked is that the main character is a HORRIBLE person. He lies, throws his friends under the bus, is self-centered, disgusting...and somehow, I still end up rooting for him and sympathizing with him a tiny bit. It's weird, but cool.

My only complaint is HOW SUDDENLY IT ENDED. LIKE JUST BAM.

But outside of that this is a cool, and really different read you should definitely check out.

Vanessa is Val's bestest buddy, and she will be guest posting throughout because she loves to read and write. She loves video games, reading comic books, working out LIKE A BEAST and photography. You can also find her at her own blog, Musings of an Aspiring Writer.