Amanda is dying. She lies in a hospital bed, slipping in and out of both consciousness and the narrative, talking to David, a little boy who may or may not be real. David interrogates her, dragging her back through memories of the events that brought her here, trying to make her see which of them are important and which are not.
David is not a normal little boy. He was saved from a poison-induced near-death by his mother's bargain with the mysterious woman in the greenhouse, and ever since has been behaving rather oddly. At the same time, Amanda tries to support his mother, Clara, who fears the changes while keeping him away from her own child, Nina.
Unless it's all just her "Fever Dream". Yep, it's a really meaningful title. There's about three ways you can interpret everything going on in this, and I've seen various reviewers consider that a strength. While the skewed nature of the writing, being entirely a conversation between Amanda and David adds no small sense of unreliability to it, I found I just wasn't actually that interested.
Through one reading of the book, it's a bit of environmental horror, but this is fairly predictable. There's not much surprise once it goes past a certain point (you'll know it when you see it), and the book doesn't quite manage to maintain the tension in the manner I was so impressed with in the recent A Quiet Place.
Alternatively, it can be considered a spiritual horror, but as that I felt it didn't go far enough. There are questions that could have been asked about David's soul, and I was disappointed to see they weren't.
The writing style was adequate, but weirdly confusing. I found myself re-reading the first few pages a couple of times just to get my head completely round who has talking and what they were doing. The difference in voices between David and Amanda were rather slight. (Might be a translation issue, not sure.)
Not one of the better novellas of the awards season.
Tagged: Book Horror Environmental disaster Novella Print