No matter the medium, some narratives defy being described in an elevator pitch. One useful example here is director Miguel Llansó’s 2019 film Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway. Combining elements of cyberpunk, Cold War drama, superhero movies, martial arts action, and paranoid thrillers, Llansó’s film is nearly impossible to summarize. (That said, one of its antagonists is a man moving in the style of stop-motion animation wearing a Stalin mask and speaking with a Scottish accent.) That quality of being impossible to categorize also fuels the narrative itself, which features multiple layers of reality and multiple versions of its CIA agent protagonist. In other words, the headiness is the point.
Michel Nieva’s novel Dengue Boy, translated into English by Rahul Bery, taps into a similar vibe. The publisher’s description invokes David Cronenberg, and while you might expect that a book with an insect-human hybrid at its center has some similarities to The Fly, the Cronenberg film this most reminded me of was his underrated eXistenZ—another work where the storyline includes different levels of reality, shifting identities, and sinister corporate malfeasance.
The year is 2272, and the planet’s polar ice caps have thawed, literally remaking the landscape. Earth is now home to both the Pampas Caribbean and the Antarctic Caribbean. Mutant species roam the land, and investors make a literal killing by betting on the reach of different infectious diseases. A video game series called Christians vs. Indians is wildly popular, with three installments figuring into the goings-on here. And, in a small town in Argentina, there lives a human-mosquito hybrid named Dengue Boy.
Precisely how such a hybrid came to exist is one of this novel’s lingering questions, and over the course of its pages, Nieva offers a few different explanations, each of which is transgressive in a different unsettling way. Dengue Boy is loathed by his classmates; this novel’s opening sentence is, in fact, “Nobody loved Dengue Boy.” The legion of indignities that he endures is almost unbearably sad, from the mockery of his classmates to the poor condition of his school uniform to his fraught relationship with his mother, whose fears that her son might turn predatory are barely kept to herself.
Indeed, he knew that his mother’s greatest worry, one that plagued her night and day, was that, when Dengue Boy became Dengue Man, he would no longer be able to control his instincts, and begin to bite and infect everyone with dengue fever, including her or one of his classmates. Not content with carrying the virus, her mutant son would become its deliberate transmitter, its gleeful homicidal vehicle, condemning her to even greater misery.
One of Dengue Boy’s classmates, El Dulce, provokes him to his breaking point, prompting Dengue Boy to undergo a striking transformation—and to take on a much more aggressive stance, though not quite the one Dengue Boy’s mother had feared. One of the results of this is the violent death of El Dulce—a fatality that the subsequent chapter jumps backwards in time to circumvent. El Dulce is an avid player of Christians vs. Indians, which seems at first to play out like a horrific retelling of European colonialism in the Americas but turns out to be more complex than it first appears. That’s also the case for René, the scion of a wealthy family who shows up in the next chapter, and whose connection to the larger plotline, such as it is, is less clear.
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It’s through René that we learn of the way that business operates in the 23rd century, where firms like Influenza Financial Services and Ebola Holding Bank make a literal killing by speculating on the Financial Virus Index.
Due to the total deforestation of the Amazon and all the forests in China and Africa, hundreds of thousands of previously unrecorded viruses now appeared every year, transported by wild animals and insects that had lost their habitats. Incubated in overcrowded, industrial-scale farms, among chickens, pigs, and other animals, these infectious agents mutated and discharged new zoonotic pandemics, which were quickly transformed by the La Pampa Stock Exchange into highly valuable subjects of speculation.
The chapters focusing on El Dulce and René provide a glimpse into the working and upper classes of this futuristic society, even as Dengue Boy (later Dengue Girl, later Mother Dengue) continues on their way, creating an increasing amount of chaos as they do.
That’s a relatively straightforward synopsis of things, and it doesn’t really get at how utterly bizarre Dengue Boy can be. To put things another way, the constantly-mutating title character with a growing penchant for absurd acts of violence is also arguably the most grounded plot thread in here. Nieva and Bery’s narration reminds the reader often that the chapters involving El Dulce are temporally located shortly before said character’s untimely death.
The video game that both René and El Dulce play also turns out to have virtual reality and role-playing elements, including some that are wholly divorced from the ostensibly historical context of the game’s premise. It’s here that things get more and more narratively complex, as El Dulce begins playing a video game within the world of another video game, one which is set in a world seemingly identical to the setting of the novel itself. In other words, we’re in thoroughly phildickian territory here, even if this novel reads nothing like one of Dick’s actual works.
As you might expect from a novel whose central character is a giant human-mosquito hybrid, “stylized” doesn’t quite do justice to how offbeat Dengue Boy can get. But between its larger-than-life moments, certain things stick out: environmental devastation, economic inequality, and the ultra-rich profiting from human suffering. It’s frequently a dizzying read, true, but there’s plenty of righteous anger at this novel’s core—and a haunting sadness that runs throughout.
Dengue Boy is published by Astra House.
