Fever Dream rather falls into a similar category as John Darnielle’s novels, particularly Universal Harvester, mining terror from mystery and firmly rooting proceedings in a recognizable, almost banal reality that proves more than capable of unsettling readers through pure, expressive language - what could be more terrifying than a strange little kid purring “ It’s happening. To reveal much more would be to rob readers of the disorienting, mesmerizing experience of Schweblin’s novel, which affects a tenor of enigmatic, eerie horror without indulging any of the genre’s more garish elements like blood-letting or monster-making.

The two women become fast friends, and Carla imparts to Amanda a story of David’s drinking poisoned water at three years old, being saved by a local woman with supernatural healing abilities, and how he has never been the same - and has to scare her - ever since.

Amanda remembers that she has come to the countryside for a vacation with her young daughter Nina in tow, and it’s here that she meets Carla, David, and Omar, the family patriarch. She doesn’t know why she is there, she can’t see, she feels like worms are crawling all over and inside of her body, and she is being implored in whispered tones to “remember” and “go back to the beginning.” These directives come courtesy of David, the young son of Amanda’s friend Carla, and the novel proceeds to go back in time a short while, as Amanda attempts to recall recent events and articulate them to the young boy by her bedside. It opens with a young mother named Amanda awakening in a clinic. Her concise but powerful work is indeed one of the creepier books to release in the past few years, if somewhat unconventionally so. With a film adaptation releasing last week on Netflix, now is as good a time as any to (re)visit Samanta Schweblin’s 2017 novel Fever Dream, particularly given that we’re right smack dab in the middle of Spooky Season. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. From the publisher: A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic.

Fever dream novel