Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on February 4th, 2025 by Astra House.
 

Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy is an unflinching fever dream of a novel, a body horror-laced dystopia where climate collapse and capitalism have fused into something grotesque, irreversible, and deeply personal. In Nieva’s reimagined Patagonia—now a tropical coastline after the Antarctic ice caps have vanished—Dengue Boy, a mutant mosquito-human hybrid, comes of age in a world that was never meant to hold him. A product of reckless bioengineering, born from corporate greed masquerading as progress, he is rejected by his mother, tormented by his peers, and alienated from his own body. But Dengue Boy is not a story of assimilation—it is a story of monstrous reclamation.

As the novel unfolds, Dengue Boy’s identity fractures and reforms in the shape of vengeance. A brutal moment of self-discovery reveals that she is, in fact, Dengue Girl—only female mosquitoes bite. With that knowledge comes a new hunger, one that cannot be contained. She kills her tormentor, El Dulce, and embarks on a killing spree targeting the ultra-wealthy, those who have thrived while the rest of the world drowns in the consequences of their excess. The novel pivots between Dengue Girl’s transformation into the revolutionary Mother Dengue and the machinations of the elite, who have turned climate catastrophe into an economic engine, profiting off engineered pandemics. It is a world where financial speculation is indistinguishable from ecological devastation, where time itself has lost its borders, collapsing into a prelife of telepathic stones and viral mutations.

Nieva’s prose is as visceral as the world he conjures—dense, all-consuming, and steeped in satire. His sentences sprawl and coil, layering scientific jargon with surrealist horror, corporate doublespeak with fevered hallucination. The effect is hypnotic, a slow descent into a world where the grotesque has become commonplace, where revenge is both deeply personal and disturbingly systemic. Dengue Boy operates on multiple levels at once: a body horror Bildungsroman, a decolonial fable, a critique of techno-capitalism’s unchecked greed. It is a novel unafraid to ask what happens when the world turns so deeply against you that the only reasonable response is to burn it all down.

To read Dengue Boy is to confront the reality that the dystopia Nieva imagines is already seeping into our own. It is a novel that festers, lingers, demands to be reckoned with. And in the end, it leaves one question hanging in the thick, humid air: what happens when the monsters bite back?

📖 Recommended For: Readers who enjoy absurdist and dystopian speculative fiction, critiques of hyper-capitalism, and body horror with a philosophical edge; those interested in the intersections of technology, climate collapse, and resistance.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy and Transformation, Climate Catastrophe and Capitalism, Revenge and Resistance, The Commodification of Life.