“Fever Dream” by Samantha Schweblin

Picked this up on a recommendation from a friend who basically just wanted to know what I made of it. Let me tell you, this book is a time and a half. It’s a short read, but it sure does mess with you.

The basic plot is that Amanda is a woman who is dying, and she’s talking to David, a young boy, in the emergency room. Through their conversation you learn about Amanda’s daughter Nina, as well as David’s mother Carla. And about how the small town that they reside in is probably poisoned.

Obviously this work centers around the relationship that parents have with their kids. Amanda often refers to a “rescue distance” or the distance it would take for her to save her daughter should something happen. She also references a “rope” connecting her to her child.

Ok SPOILERS AHEAD so David was a normal kid, but then was poisoned and Carla opted to have part of his soul sent to another body, minimizing the poison in him and rescuing him, but as a result something returned to his body while part of his soul went somewhere else. Which seems like a pretty fucked thing to do to me. I’d rather have the kid stay in their body and die then subject another parent to a Freaky Friday type switcheroo. But that’s just me. And in the end the same thing happens to Nina when she and Amanda are poisoned.

Carla goes nuts looking for the piece of David in the town, and she’s convinced that her child is a monster because she keeps finding him burying animals. Somehow David is causing them to die without touching them, which is very unclear, and then digs their grave. I get the feeling that David is killing everything that comes into contact with the poison in the town. Possibly so that they don’t go through what he did. The splitting of soul stuff.

Something just seems off about Carla the whole book. I thought she was some evil party initially, but by the end the characters seem to confirm her as blameless. She means well, but still splits kids in half.

My best guess, if I were to synthesize this, is that being a mother can lead to unhealthy attachments, due to some poison inherent in society. And those mothers with unhealthy attachments affect those around them. Amanda had an attachment, not really an unhealthy one, to her child. But her kid was split nonetheless. Something like that. There are many layers to this story, this is just my best guess at one of the first ones. Take a look and try to decode it for yourself if you want.