Tuesday, July 29, 2014

[Book Review] Fiend by Peter Stenson

FiendFiend
by 
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.



Coming from a different aspect, Fiend is a definite mix between Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. It's twisted, raw, and has all the dark humor that a person could possibly handle. 

When living dead come out, first the junkies think that they are hallucinating. Chase, the main character, has that rich-boy-gone-druggie symptom and have been in that hole for awhile. After killing a zombie girl with a typewriter by his friend Typewriter (get it, get it?), they go out to the streets to find survivors and some dope. 

I loved how expressive everyone was. A group of people trying to survive by cooking up drugs and fighting off "Chuckes" was really entertaining and the whole idea of drug addicts surviving was unique. I did like Chase, although KK annoyed me sometimes. He wanted a normal life, but he knew that it might never happen, now that the population has gone to sh*t.

Fiend is a loud, disturbing, gore novel with strong language and sexual situations that is for the right person. That dark and twisted humor can only be handled for certain people and I'm definitely glad that I could say I never saw this side of me. Fiendbrings up visuals from your head that you never experienced before and may never will with any other book. 

I received this book free from BloggingForBooks in exchange for an honest review. This did not influence my opinion in any way.