Fever Dream (2017) by Samantha Schweblin turned out to be an exciting surprise. I first read about it on a list of recent horror fiction. While I expected it to be fun, I didn’t really think that it would also turn out to be good.
It’s much more than just a straight horror novel, although its near-future eco-sci fi and horror elements are clear. But it’s also surrealist and experimental, with a lyrical collapsing of human character and identity and difference and a vivid use of repetition and circularity. Its multiple perspectives and distortions, as well as the way it plays with uncertain and frightening boundaries between the objective and the subjective, lead to constant disruptions of understanding just what might be going on. It’s both easy to read and difficult to grasp, an accessible combination of genre pop lit and experimental extremes.
Originally from Brazil, Schweblin currently lives in Berlin. The geographical location of the events in the novel is another one of its fascinating uncertainties. Fever Dream is a book about disorienting surfaces and speculation about what lies under those surfaces. If ultimately it’s a book that dwells mostly on those surfaces, with not as much below them as it perhaps promises, it is nonetheless disturbing and beautiful and powerful. It’s a book about a planet in which people are falling apart as much as the land on which they find themselves, but not in a way that anybody can expect or understand.
