title: Fever Dream: A Novel
author: Samanta Schweblin
description: To call Schweblins novella <b>eerie and hallucinatory</b> is only to gesture at its compact power; the fantastical here simply dilates a reality we begin to accept as terrifying and true....Schweblins book is suffused with haunting images and big questions.<i>New York Times Book Review</i><br /><br />"Samanta Schweblins <b>electric</b> story reads like a <i>Fever Dream</i>.<i>Vanity Fair</i><br /><br />I picked up <i>Fever Dream</i> in the wee hours, and a low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read it. I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldnt bring myself to look out the windows. [T]he <b>genius </b>of <i>Fever Dream</i> is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to <b>a new literary genre altogether</b>.Jia Tolentino, <i>The New Yorker</i><br /><br />"Anauseous, eerie read, sickeningly good."Emma Cline, <i>The Girls</i><br /><br />"Subtle, dreamy and indelibly creepy."<i>The Economist </i>(Best Books of 2017)<br /><br />Never have I ever been so afraid to read a book right before bed<i>Marie Claire</i><br /><br />A spare, hypnotic literary page-turner.<i>O</i>, the Oprah Magazine<br /><br /><b>Mesmerizing</b>... Schweblin, though, is an artist of remarkable restraint Schweblin renders psychological trauma with such alacrity that the conceit of a poisoned environment feels almost beside the point.<i>Washington Post</i><br /><br />This small debut novel packs a mighty, and lingering, punch.... [A]compact, but explosive, package. Schweblin delivers <b>a skin-prickling masterclass in dread and suspense</b>.... With virtuoso skill, well served in Megan McDowells finely textured translation, Schweblin fuses a study in maternal anxiety with an ecological horror story. She refracts both strands through the eerie prism of her narrative, almost as if Henry James had scripted a disaster movie about toxic agribusiness."<i>The Economist</i><br /><br />Elusiveness takes a terrifyingly creepy form in this dazzling short novel.<i>NPR</i><br /><br />"Unsettling... [T]he novel represents a <b>perfect </b>marriage of form and subject, in which its narrative instability  which is so of the literary moment  viscerally recreates the insecurities of life in the Argentine countryside today.... [Schweblin]has found ways to electrify and destabilize the physical world... [<i>Fever Dream</i> is]the scariest of all things: a ghost story that is, in essence, true."<i>Los Angeles Times</i><br /><br />Its rare for a book to do exactly what its title says it will do without any caveats or reservations. Its even more rare for a book to achieve the kind of woozy, elliptical, intimate horror implied by a title like <i>Fever Dream</i>. But this debut novel by Argentinian short story writer Samanta Schweblin  translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell  does exactly that....<i>Fever Dream</i>is a novel stripped down to its barest elements, all dialogue and atmosphere, and working with only those elements, it manages to create an authentic nightmare <b>If youre after creeping, insidious, psychologically compelling horror, then you wont do better</b>.<i>Vox</i><br /><br />An absorbing and inventive tale... Schweblin is a fine mythmaker, singular in her own fantastical artistry. <i>Houston Chronicle</i><br /><br />"Mesmerizing, frightening...Schweblin's writing, translated from the original Spanish by Megan McDowell, is sparse, precise, but full of looming disquiet. It's an astonishing work from the Latin American author."<i>Broadly</i><br /><br /> A remarkable accomplishment in literary suspense. <i>New York Journal of Books</i><br /><br />If you want to read something that terrifies you and upsets you, and makes you feel like youre going crazy, yet also makes you feel like you cant put it down and you never want it to end because you love it so much, this is the book for you <b>Its some of the most compelling, fantastic writing Ive ever read</b>!<i>BookRiot</i><br /><br />This is a weird hallucination of a bookreading it feels like an experience, like something that happens to you, as infectious and mysterious and unstoppable and possibly magical as the disease that powers its plot. <i>LitHub</i><br /> <br /> <i>Fever Dream</i> is worth reading for its inventiveness alone. Schweblin gives us memorable characters and a haunting parable, all in fewer than 200 short pages.<i>Huffington Post</i><br /><br />"<b>A taut, exquisite page-turner</b>vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread....While the book resides in the realm of the uncanny, its concerns are all too real. Once the top blows off Schweblins chest of horrors, into which wed been peeking through a masterfully manipulated crack, what remains is an unsettling and significant dissection of maternal love and fear, of the devastation weve left to the future, and of our inability to escape or control the unseen and unimagined threats all around us.In <b>a literary thriller of the highest order</b>, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future."<i>Kirkus</i>, STARRED review<br /><br />[A] pulsating debutSchweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill. <i>Publishers Weekly</i><br /><br />The unique style, the quick paced rhythm and the <b>amazingly wise </b>and compact storytelling create a special novel that will stay in your mind long after you put this book down. <b>Etgar Keret, </b>author of <i>The Seven Good Years</i><br /><br /><b>Samanta Schweblin is a magician</b>, and reading her work is an intense, almost physical experience. This <b>mind-bending</b> book sheds new lightor, rather, new darknesson the intense power of love in a poisoned world. <b>You must read it. </b>Prepare to be mesmerized, riveted, terrified, and changed. <b>Helen Phillips</b>, author of <i>The Beautiful Bureaucrat</i><br /><br />A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate.<i>Fever Dream</i>is a triumph of Schweblins outlandish imagination.<br /><b>Juan G<b></b>briel Vasquez, </b>author of<i>The Sound of Things Falling</i>and<i>Reputations</i><br /><br /><i>Fever Dream</i> is a small <b>masterpiece</b>, a beautiful and chillingly contemporary book. Every word throbs a kind of wisdom that can only come from a meticulous and fully engaged observation of reality. <b>Alejandro Zambra</b>, author of <i>Multiple Choice</i> and <i>My Documents</i><br /><br />Samanta Schweblin will injure you, however safe you may feel. <b>Jesse Ball</b>, author of <i>A Cure for Suicide</i> and <i>How to Set a Fire and Why</i><br /><br />Samanta Schweblin is one of the most promising voices in modern literature. <b>Mario Vargas Llosa </b><br /> <br /> She has a unique, inventive voice, and her stories have this ability to veer off into strange and unexpected territories with sublime grace. I admire and envy this gift. <b>Daniel Alarcn</b>,author of <i>At Night We Walk in Circles</i><br /><br />In spare, lucid prose, Schweblin demonstrates again and again that she knows the weight of what is left unsaid in the comings and goings of everyday life. Then, in the turn of a phrase, she forces the reader to shift perspective; she has a gift for sketching comfortable worlds and then disrupting them with images of dark, startling power. <i>Electric Literature</i>
zlib_text: Fever is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used
  fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
  A Loveswept eBook Original
  Copyright © 2015 by Jamie K. Schmidt
  Excerpt from Surrender by Violetta Rand copyright © 2015 by Violetta Rand
  All rights reserved.
  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin
  Random House Company, New York.
  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
  eBook ISBN 9781101882580
  Cover photograph: © Shutterstock
  www.readloveswept.com
  v4.0
  ep
  
  Contents
  Cover
  Title Page
  Copyright
  Chapter 1
  Chapter 2
  Chapter 3
  Chapter 4
  Chapter 5
  Chapter 6
  Chapter 7
  Chapter 8
  Chapter 9
  Chapter 10
  Chapter 11
  Chapter 12
  Chapter 13
  Chapter 14
  Chapter 15
  Chapter 16
  Chapter 17
  Chapter 18
  By Jamie K. Schmidt
  About the Author
  The Editor’s Cor