I feel it bears repeating why I enjoy horror. I have a simile, though the simile falls apart. I don’t care. You know how in Jurassic Park the idea is that tourists can safely ride along in a car on a rail while they see real dinosaurs? Basically, engaging with what is dangerous in a safe way. That’s what horror is for me. We get to interact with that which scares us while safely remaining in the rail car. Now, we all know that in Jurassic Park the point is that the dinosaurs are unpredictable and none of it is safe, but I can’t think of another comparison. Maybe one of those boat tours with a glass bottom and you can see the sharks? That probably works better, but here we are.

Anyway, for our zombie-theme month in the spooky book club I lead, we read Fiend by Peter Stenson. The title refers not only to the zombie-like creatures but also the main characters, all of whom are meth addicts fiending for drugs. In a twist on the genre, one night everyone came back as the living dead with the odd quick of giggling. Who ever heard of a giggling zombie? But thus they are.

Our main character, Chase, and his best friend, “Typewriter,” have been holed up for the past week getting high. When they see a little girl eating a rottweiler, they realize something is wrong, but not the full extent — a zombie apocalypse. In this novel, zombies are common knowledge. It’s a choice filmmakers and writers make to have zombies be “new” in their plots, but Stenson sets his characters in a world that has the same info as his readers. Chase realizes, “I’m thinking about every show I’ve ever seen, every film, about arms outstretched, moans, and decaying flesh, and ghouls and living dead.” The only people who didn’t “turn” that fateful night are meth addicts. To add an urgency, the only way to keep from turning is to continue using meth, a drug that requires chemistry and specific ingredients and someone who knows what they’re doing.

We have a huge problem with opioids in my state, and I cannot fathom spending more than a minute with someone high on meth. But I did read a whole book inside the head of a meth addict, his meth-head friend, and his meth-ed out girlfriend named, bizzarely, KK. Based on the table of contents, the story lasts one week. I enjoyed the time stamps, too, because these characters are tweaked out 24/7, and the time lets you know if it’s 2:00AM or 2:00PM. That made a difference to me. Rather than your typical survival novel in which you are rooting for the characters, in this case, they all suck so hard as humans. I wasn’t rooting for anyone, but I also wanted to know where the story would go, so I was hooked. I’d never read anything like Fiend, so even though the zombie sub-genre is tired, Fiend was not.

For example, in most zombie fiction, the characters keep moving to survive, searching for communities that have been established and feel like normal, pre-zombie times. It’s always a trap; someone in that commune is eating people or has sex slaves or something. But in Fiend, Chase, Typewriter, and KK have to find someone who can cook meth. We’re led to a cabin in the woods, a juvenile detention center, a Chinese neighborhood. I definitely felt like the tourist in the Jurassic Park car as people lied, stole, picked scabs, used a lot of slurs (which I accept because who has ever met a politically correct drug addict?), and were in general a sad mess. The body is king in this novel, and Stenson doesn’t hold back on his descriptions. The irony is the world has come to an end, and the people left to save it were known as “the walking dead” before the zombie apocalypse.

Stenson addresses many questions through Fiend without putting them right in your face. Chase and KK had been apart for the year before the apocalypse because she wanted to get clean and he did not. As a result, he stalks her that whole year, which we get in intrusive memories during the present chaos. He recalls, “She told me she couldn’t do it anymore. That she was leaving. Going back to treatment. I laughed. I told her she couldn’t quit.” When KK relapses, Chase is happy that they can be together again, even if he has to save in from the walking, giggling dead. We must ask ourselves the relationship between codependency and sobriety.

Also, when Chase and his crew go to a Chinese neighborhood, the meth cook there berates them “for “lowering” themselves to come to the Chinese ghetto “Because you figured us Hmong trash know what to do when the world ended,” whereas Chase was often bailed out of trouble by his “rich” white family. And lastly, if humanity’s only hope is to be high, does Stenson imply that life is so hard we must turn to chemical coping mechanisms? That the only way out is to blast off and ignore it? What would you do at end times?

I enjoyed Fiend and found myself laughing several times, but that sort of dark laughter that you know is wrong. After they reach a a guy living in the woods known as The Albion who cooks meth, they stay shacked up for days before realizing they all stink and are tweaking. Chase proposes they go skinny dipping in a nearby pond:

The Albino lets go of his dick and gives a few hip gyrations, sending it in a helicopter, and he says, Ready for takeoff, and then he laughs like this is the funniest thing ever and we do too and he sprints in his gimpy gait to the pond, jumping, his legs pulled to a cannonball. He lands in about a foot of water.