Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099558831 ISBN 13: 9780099558835

Publisher: Windmill Books, 2014

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.

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2013: Fiend may be his first novel, but Peter Stenson isn't dipping his big toe into the shallow end of the pool here; it's more like he's cannonballing naked into a murky lake of unknown depth, wearing a blindfold just for kicks. The payoff, for those willing to dive in with him, is an exhilarating rush of a first-person read that's rife with graphic violence, riddled with expletives, devoid of quotation marks, and determined to test your sense of squeamishness. Our protagonist, Chase Daniels, is an unlikely choice for a "hero" with an even more unlikely chance of survival--an unabashed addict who has just snapped out of a week-long drug binge to find himself facing a dystopian nightmare. In a world narrowed down to meth-heads and (a refreshingly original take on) zombies, this kid, with his only vaguely remaining moral compass, is our only option for empathy, our only hope for humanity. He's got no special skills, and he's not connected to a crucial government agency. He knows only what he sees or feels, and so do we. It's gritty, it's gripping, and it's a great debut. --Robin A. Rothman

About the Author:

PETER STENSON received his MFA from Colorado State University in 2012. His stories and essays have been published in The Sun, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Post Road, Fugue, Harpur Palate, The Pinch, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. He is also a recovering addict and has been sober for 10 years. He lives with his wife and daughter in Denver.