Evolution, ethnography, epidemics—this is the soup from which Dengue Boy, a brilliantly strange new novel by the Argentine author Michel Nieva, emerges. The eponymous Dengue Boy is a mosquito–human hybrid who might be an experiment, a genetic mutant, or the result of some terrible corporate crime. He might be all three at once. In any case, it doesn’t matter much to the monstrous creature, whom we find living in 2272 in what remains of Argentina after the melting of the Antarctic ice cap has rendered most of the world either underwater or uninhabitably hot.
Hot enough to roast a turkey in 20 minutes flat at what passes for room temperature