The Fiend was published by Random House in 1964. It is Millar’s most disturbing novel and one of the bravest: she writes from inside the consciousness of a pedophile without excusing, sensationalizing, or simplifying him. Charlie Gowen has served time for molesting a child. Released on parole, he lives with his brother’s family in a California neighborhood and watches, from behind a fence, a nine-year-old girl named Jessie playing in her yard.
The novel does not depict sexual assault — that is not its purpose. Instead it charts the slow, terrible approach of catastrophe: Charlie’s efforts to control his compulsion, the community’s failure to acknowledge his presence and its danger, the girl’s family absorbed in their own dramas (a failing marriage, financial pressure), the parole system’s inadequacy. Millar distributes responsibility across the entire social fabric: Charlie is not the sole monster but the point where multiple failures converge.
The title — “The Fiend” — is ironic: the community wants to believe in a fiend, a creature wholly other, because that belief exempts them from examining the systems that create and then release damaged people into proximity with children. Millar offers no comfort and no solution — only the unflinching observation that societies prefer the mythology of evil to the harder work of prevention.
Collecting The Fiend
First edition (Random House, New York, 1964): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75