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Oh this was so creepy and good!

There was so much packed into such a short narrative but it's also incredibly effective in its density, its breakneck pace, its ambiguity. There's a lot here to parse: the horror of environmental degradation written across the bodies of children; poisoning, fevers,

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and the trauma of illness breaking the "soul" from the wetwork of human bodies; the immensity of parental love in all its wonder and terror; the sense that no matter what you do, the worst will always happen and we are powerless to stop it.

I read this all in one sitting and I'm glad I did. It was a perfect length to sustain the ethereal feverish mood of the story. This was a great fusion between magical realist conventions and ecohorror, a beautiful terrifying book from an author who I will definitely return to!

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Such a spooky little story, and creatively told. A dying woman carries on a dialogue with a boy sifting through the recent past, trying to figure out the moment of pivotal moments in time. She tells him of conversations she had with his mother about eerie events, both with him and with her own

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daughter. The elusiveness of truth and the horror of possible harm to children create a spellbinding narrative, with ecological overtones. It’s creative, well-written, and worth checking out.

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I am going to start this review with a link to the Tournament of Books, which you can find here. I have enjoyed following the TOB, and this year, [Fever Dream] won out over [Lincoln in the Bardo]; [Exit West]; [Sing, Unburied Sing] and other books. The reviewers all found this literary horror story

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impossible to put down.

[[Meaghan O'Connell]] wrote:

I had no intention to stay up past my bedtime to read an entire book that night, but putting it down was unfathomable. I was gripped, yes, but also sick with dread. I had to keep reading if for no other reason than with the hope that if I reached the end everything would be settled, the suspense would be over, the mystery solved. I was too ill at ease to look away. Getting up to pee in the quiet house had me genuinely unnerved, the way you feel after a bad dream. Vigilant. It had me clutching the walls in the hallway as I made my way to the bathroom, and later when I went to check on my sleeping son (I had to!).

And here is [[Shelly Oria]] :

"Well, Fever Dream saw me and went, Ha. “Ha” as in, I so got this. “Ha” as in, This sucker? I’m going to lure her into my cage, make a cute face so she pets me, AND THEN EAT HER ALIVE. You think I’m being dramatic? Read Fever Dream; this book will make you its bitch."

OK, so I had to read it after that build-up, so I got it from the library, but then forgot the above warnings and picked it up at 9 PM on a weeknight. I had to read straight through. Luckily it is only 180 pages.

Originally written in Spanish (translator Megan McDowell), it's a dialogue with woman who lies dying, in a conversation with a young boy, the son of a friend, who might be a ghost. Or maybe not? Creepy, great writing and translating, about parenthood and environmental terror. It's a gut punch.

I am not sure it's actually better than all those other books, but I can't argue with the judgement. I will not be forgetting this book soon.

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My favorite book of the year, so far:
I grabbed this book off the shelf on my way out the door because it was the smallest book available and would be the least heavy to carry around on a day that I would be carrying a lot of bags. I started reading it while waiting for my train. The train was a

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half hour late so I managed to get a good bit of reading done.
This book grabs you on the first page and fills you with a sense of urgency -- something terrible is happening; what is it? who are these people? After returning home from my errands I sat down and finished the book.
This is a strange and creepy book. The writing is brilliant. I wish I knew someone who reads this type of fiction because I really want to push this book on others.

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This is one of the worst books I have ever read. The prose is confusing, interspersing an elderly woman’s dream sequence with a present conversation between her and her grandson. The woman is in the hospital and on her death bed, while her grandson, who is at her bedside, urges her to finish a

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story of when he was much younger.

The characters are not developed at all. I never felt like I knew them nor was I able to relate to them. The book is neither a thriller nor horror, as it is touted to be. I do not understand the huge amount of hype surrounding the book.

The book is merely an attempt by the author to deliver a political statement regarding the use of pesticides in her home country. I do not read books for an author to preach to me or deliver a political statement. Just give me a good story. Unfortunately, this book fails to produce a satisfying story.

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"Fresh and startling, this is like nothing you've ever read before."

Bold words indeed. And yet, this might possibly be the quickest I've ever read a novella -- in little more than 90 minutes. I literally could not put it down; the way the story starts off, its breakneck pace, the words, the

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questions, the curiosity... dang near perfection! Here's page one:

They're like worms.
What kind of worms?
Like worms, all over.
It's the boy who's talking, murmuring into my ear.
I am the one asking questions.
Worms in the body?
Yes, in the body.
Earthworms?
No, another kind of worms.
It's dark and I can't see. The sheets are rough, they bunch up under my body. I can't move, but I'm talking.

If you're open to the creepy, to the surreal, to the unconventional narrative structure, I dare you to pick this up and NOT devour it in one sitting.

The depths of maternal love and the lengths to which she'll go to save her child wrapped up in an ecological horror story set in Argentina. When I say "horror," I mean in the (now seemingly) old-fashioned sense of the word: meticulous storytelling that conjures fear through a blend of reality and fantasy, an almost instant state of anxiety, dread, and suspicion.

4.5 stars

"I always imagine the worst-case scenario. Right now, for instance, I'm calculating how long it would take me to jump out of the car and reach Nina if she suddenly ran and leapt into the pool. I call it the "rescue distance": that's what I've named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should."

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This book is terrifying, but not in any conventional sense. Deceptively short and 'simple' it left me wondering what I had just experienced. The narrator is impaired, but exactly how and what is going on is difficult to determine at first. She is in conversation with someone, who turns out to be

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her neighbor's young son, David. But all this is meted out slowly as the drama and suspense starts to build and the pivotal incident is revealed. We learn the narrator is Amanda and she and her young daughter Nina and her husband have rented a vacation house in the country that is next door to Carla and David. Though it has only been a couple days, Carla and Amanda become friends and spend a fair amount of time together. Then, trust having been built, Carla reveals some truths about David - how he became deathly ill (poisoned) after he drank water from the stream behind the house, how she consulted a voodoo type healer instead of the local traditional, inferior clinic. How the healer heals him is basically putting him into another body, which is why he is so strange. Amanda thinks Carla is nuts, but it has gotten into her head and starts to dictate her actions, and also becomes part of the narrative. It has a Turn of the Screw feel - who is the crazy one here? And it also raises questions about motherhood, about the environment, about community. It's haunting.

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A hypnotic, lyrically specific ecological literary/horror story. Reads like a modern day Edgar Allan Poe story.

A really strange read but still tapping at the edges of my mind a day after I've finished it so....

I'll do a re-read (it's short...only around 180 pages, with smaller formatting) and see if I can make sense of that ending???

Amanda and her young daughter Nina are spending a summer holiday in a village in the country (the old-fashioned sort of holiday where dad comes out from the city at the weekends). Amanda is a nervous mother, constantly aware of the length of the invisible cord attaching her to her toddler — the

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"rescue distance" of the Spanish title. And she's all the more frightened when her neighbour, Clara, tells her a strange tale about how a local traditional healer saved the life — but apparently not the soul — of her son David. Despite herself, Amanda has come to believe that there is something very evil, in a horror-film kind of way, going on in the village, involving children with strange deformities, and the unexplained deaths of farm animals. As David patiently interviews her in her hospital bed after she falls ill herself, we start to realise that there is a horrifyingly simple, and quite rational explanation for all this. He keeps trying to steer Amanda towards seeing it, but she can't help veering back to the irrational.

Clever, and written in a very original way (and with a lot of characteristically Porteño vocabulary that defeated the dictionary on my Kobo...) — I found myself reading this as more a book about parenthood than about pollution catastrophes. And of course about the struggle between the rational and the irrational in our minds when we come under stress.

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Unsettling little book. A pervasive sense of dread compelled me forward, even though I was left with many unanswered questions. I finished it in one sitting.

So I really enjoyed this weird little book, and not just because it as a super fast read. The interview format is interesting. But the ending...or the stopping might be a better way to put it. I have SO MANY questions. In many ways it feels like this book is not quite done, because really I cannot

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rate the book any higher without some resolution to these questions.

--is this just a fever dream? Malarial or otherwise?
--is the entire town/area being poisoned?
--industrial, farm, or personal poison (are people being poisoned by C?)
--do A and N die? Does C? Is that why A's husband goes to see C's husband and son, and C is not there?
--ARGH

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Yeah, no. First of all, it was too confusing. It took me forever to figure out the dual narrators so I ended up having to go back and re-read about a quarter of the book once I did. But I could have forgiven that confusion given the terrific creepy af atmosphere. But ultimately the payoff just

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wasn't worth it. It didn't end so much as it just faded away.

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Just won the Tournament of Books. Originally I wasn't going to read this but the initial judge who advanced this book convinced me it was worth a read. Like a lot of people I read it in one day. It's a compelling book, rather eerie and one can interpret it in many ways. Dark but good.

A short and odd little translation that constantly feels like a fever dream from the title. The tension begins on page one and never lets up. Somehow short translated novels end up being the oddest books that I read. I don't mind that this was so short and wasn't concrete with answers but I think

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it might have been a little too vague for me. Some of these great images will stick with me though. I read this as it was the summer winner of The Morning News Tournament of Books.

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A short read that doesn't hold your hand and not afraid to make you feel uncomfortable.

The title pretty much sums up this short little story. A fever dream is pretty much what reading this felt like. Confusing, dreamy and spooky.
Wasn't my cup of tea because of that.
Schwebin is a good writer though and I will check out whatever she does next.

This little gem of a book lassoed me at page 1! It is a tale told through a conversation between David and Amanda. It is dreamlike and surreal and so many questions begin to float through your mind, so you keep reading and reading and reading. From the start, we know that Amanda seems to be

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paralyzed and it is apparent that David has been through what Amanda is experiencing and it is frightening. Other characters they reference include Amanda's daughter, Nina and David's mother Carla and , oh yes, a mysterious lady in the green house. I could not put this book down yet the conclusion was a bit nebulous and rather undefined. But, don't let that hold you back, there's too much to this book that works.

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"Fever Dream" is the first novel and the first English translation of Argentinean author Samanta Schweblin who has also published several Spanish language short-story collections.

Fever Dream's original 2014 Spanish title was "Distancia de rescate" (literal title translation: The Distance of

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Rescue/The Rescue Distance) which is a recurring theme of the book that is first introduced on pg. 19: "I'm calculating how long it would take me to jump out of the car and reach Nina if she suddenly ran and leapt into the pool. I call it the "rescue distance": that's what I've named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it..." The new English title is better as an overall description of the book and the process of reading it.

The set-up of the book is that a mother named Amanda is being questioned by a boy named David. David's speech is in italic font to distinguish it from Amanda's. Theirs are the only voices we hear, but Amanda reports on events from several days to several years previous and quotes dialogue from others including that of David's mother Carla and Amanda's own daughter Nina. I am over-explaining this here because I found that I got disoriented after 20 or 30 pages into the book and had to restart in order to get a firmer grip on what was going on. I'm not going to explain further because that would get into spoiler territory but I read "Fever Dream" with a mounting sense of unease and dread and even though the reader is mostly left to draw their own conclusions as to the causes and circumstances of Amanda's and David's situation it is unlikely that anyone will not have a clear opinion although those may range from the supernatural to those grounded in reality.

The year is early yet but I think "Fever Dream" is a strong candidate for my most compelling and compulsive read of 2017. It is actually quite short as well and its 183 page length is deceptive, as each page has only about 150 words or less on it (I think average books are about 300 words a page) so you can probably read it in about 3 hours/one sitting.

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It really does read like a fever dream. The story is told from a very unconventional perspective, but it starts making sense once the central conceit is revealed. And what a revelation it is.

It's a quick read and a riveting story. Saying more will only spoil it for you, so I won't say anymore. Go

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enjoy it right now.

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Earlier this year I read Little Eyes by Schweblin and it was mesmerizing so I am set on reading the rest of her translated work. Fever Dream is the second book by Samanta Schweblin that I have read and well Fever Dream is even more deeply weird and timely than even Little Eyes was.

My experience

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reading Little Eyes was so good I came to Fever Dream just knowing that she wrote it and nothing else. I put total trust in Schweblin and so I dove into the book blind and if you do the same you will not be dissapointed and, to this reader, it is better to know little about what we are going to find. Go almost blindly, little by little fitting the pieces of the puzzle, trying to separate madness from sanity, or even the dream of waking. It will not be entirely possible.

Leaving aside the different themes it touches, this reading has been above all an experience, a claustrophobic, addictive, oppressive and terrifying. Fever Dream as the title suggests its deeply weird. It is read in tension, with restlessness and some anxiety, and passages are devastatingly heartbreaking, hoping that the narrator, guided by a voice that encourages her to hurry, will be able to realize what is important, reach the exact point, an explanation.

In an interview, Schweblin said: "What I think is that although the literature I try to do is approaching the fantastic at times, for me the plausibility is fundamental. I really care about starting from an almost totally realistic story, but that what happens in between can be a bit supernatural. The idea is that this is produced by a very small shift in reality, as a detail. The result is monstrous, but in reality the anomaly is minimal."

In Fever Dream, and so far in my experience for Schweblin in general, Terror comes from the real, and the fantastic is only emphasized.

For this reader the themes were powerful: on loss, on grief, on things-that-happen-in-the-country ((for this Mexican-American reader that country thing that keeps coming up in Fever Dream is very relatable, it may be a Latin thing but I suspect is a universal thing, that what happens in the countryside, in the sparsely populated big places, that things are different, strange, and even sometimes unsettling and unnatural.))

AUDIOBOOK:
The narration by Hillary Huber is just spectacular. Her pacing adds to the tension and her tone is harrowing and heartfelt. Really a flawless companion to the text and really heightens the effect and draws out some meaning towards the end. The sound quality was great very crisp none of that 'empty-room' sound many books even recently still have.

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I read this without any real idea of what I was reading or why I was reading it. I got to the end and had no real idea of what I had just read. What I can tell you is that I could not stop reading it and while I was reading it those ideas about did not seem relevant.

The title is apt as it read like

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a half remembered dream that was itself the memory of another dream. It happened somewhere between the waking self and the remembered self, somewhere in that twilight of consciousness between wake and sleep.

I still cannot remember what it was about but it stays with me like a series of faded colour tableaux from an old tv in a holiday cabin somewhere in the past.

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While lying in a rural clinic dying, Amanda has a long conversation with a young boy David who is sitting with her seeking answers to certain questions he has. Amanda is seeking answers to as to where her daughter is. David is the son of Amanda's neighbor Carla, and is a few years older than

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Amanda
s daughter.

The book is surreal, and really did have the feel of a dream story, or at least the narrative conveyed the thoughts of a person thrashing with a fever, not entirely logical or rational, but seeming so as they are being experienced. Unlike many surreal works, which I usually don't like, I found this very easy to read (if not necessarily to understand) and the characters and their situations were very relatable. One thing that really spoke to me was the "rescue distance," which is the distance a mother feels she can let her young child roam--the furthest safe distance for the child. I foundnd this to be a very original, yet highly readable novella.

4 stars

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"Fever Dream" is an apt title for this story. Frankly, it was an unpleasant experience to listen to this. The rambling went on so long that I stopped caring about figuring what the heck was going on.