Fever Dream

First published in Spanish as Distancia de rescate in 2014, Fever Dream is a short novel by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin. Translated by Megan McDowell and published in English in 2017, the novel has received critical acclaim, including a place on the 2017 Booker International Prize Shortlist and the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella. A film adaptation was released in 2021.

Set in a small town in rural Argentina, Fever Dream tells the story of Amanda, a woman visiting from the capital of Buenos Aires with her young daughter. Amanda is hospitalized with poisoning symptoms, and the novel consists of a conversation between her and David, a strange nine-year-old boy, as they try to uncover what led to Amanda’s illness. Amanda’s feverish, hallucinatory story explores themes of maternal anxiety, environmental pollution, and connection and isolation. The novel includes many classic horror tropes, including dead animals, unsettling children, nightmares, and a threatening natural world. However, in the end, Schweblin suggests that these horrors might have a perfectly mundane, and therefore all the more terrifying, explanation. 

This guide uses the 2017 Riverhead Books paperback edition of the novel.

Content Warning: The source text uses outdated and offensive language for people with disabilities, which is reproduced here only in quoted material.

Plot Summary

Amanda lies dying in a hospital bed in rural Argentina. A young mother visiting from Buenos Aires, she cannot remember how she got there, but she can hear nine-year-old David speaking in her ear. David tells her that she has been sickened by something “like worms” and must think hard to discover when these worms came into being.

Amanda remembers arriving at her country vacation home with her daughter and meeting David’s mother, Carla, telling her memories in the present tense. The two women become friends, and one day, Carla tells Amanda a story about David. When Carla’s son was a baby, her husband, Omar, bred racehorses. He borrowed an expensive stallion to sire his foals, but the horse escaped when Carla was home alone with David. She found the animal drinking from a nearby stream and captured him, but David played in the same water while she was distracted. As she pulled her son away, Carla noticed a dead bird in the stream.

The next day, the stallion was deathly ill, its face so swollen it looked like “a monstrosity.” Carla knew immediately that the water had made the horse sick; it wasn’t uncommon in the country, and she knew that the same fate awaited her son if she didn’t act quickly. She rushed David to the house of a local healer, who told her the boy would die unless they performed a migration, transferring his spirit along with some of the poison into another body. Desperate, Carla agreed to the procedure. However, afterward, David was never the same. He developed strange white spots on his skin and answered Carla’s questions with the phrase “That is not important” (96). Most unsettlingly, the boy started burying dead animals in the backyard, creating a cemetery of 28 small graves.

Amanda doesn’t take Carla’s story seriously, dismissing it as country superstition. She is obsessed with monitoring the “rescue distance” between her daughter, Nina, and herself, ensuring she can always reach Nina in time if danger strikes. However, Amanda wonders if a tragedy similar to Carla’s could befall her and her own daughter.

Amanda and Nina enjoy their first days in the country, even though they are punctuated by strange sights: a dog with a missing leg trotting past the soy fields and a girl with an “enormous forehead” and one leg far shorter than the other at a local store. One evening, Amanda takes a walk while Nina is napping, hoping to see the landscape so she can understand the rescue distance and be better prepared to protect her daughter. When she returns, Carla is outside. She tells Amanda that David is inside with Nina, and they must unlock the door quickly. Amanda starts to panic, even though she doesn’t understand the danger; David is just a little boy, after all. The two mothers get inside and find both children perfectly safe. Amanda yells at Carla, angry with the other woman for frightening her with her silly superstitions and beliefs. Even though the danger has passed, Amanda cannot shake the unsettled feeling and thinks about cutting the trip short. That night, she has a nightmare and wakes up determined to leave.

As she packs, Amanda decides that she needs to say goodbye to Carla, so she and Nina venture out to the farm where Carla works. As they wait for the other woman, Amanda and Nina sit in the grass and watch men wearing gloves unload plastic drums from a truck. Here, David’s voice interrupts, telling Amanda that this is the important moment they have been looking for, but Amanda insists that nothing is out of place. When she and Nina get up, Nina complains of being wet. She tells her mother that her hands smell bad, and Amanda notices that her clothes are wet, too. However, she tells Nina the wetness is just dew, and they walk with Carla to see Omar’s old stables.

The two women talk while Nina plays around a well. Eventually, the little girl comes to them complaining that her hands are stinging. The two women placate her with kisses and cookies, and she goes off to play again. Then Amanda starts to feel unwell. She lies down in the grass but cannot tell Carla what is wrong with her. As she rests, Carla goes for the car and drives Amanda and Nina to the clinic. A nurse on duty diagnoses Nina and Amanda with sunstroke and sends them home. They return to Carla’s house, where Amanda’s fever worsens, and she drifts in and out of consciousness.

She finally wakes early in the morning. Nina is also awake and begs her mother to leave. They get the car, and Amanda starts driving. However, she cannot see well. Her eyes are burning and watering, and she almost doesn’t see a group of people crossing the street. She stops and sees a group of “strange children,” including David and the girl from town, walking with the nurses. They are going to the clinic, where they will spend the day instead of at school with the “children who are born right” (156). Amanda gets out of the car, hoping the nurses might give her some water, but she collapses in the street as she hears Nina crying.

Back in the hospital, David explains that Carla came to see Amanda when she learned where she was. She found Amanda burning up with a fever and hallucinating, but no one knew where Nina was. The girl was still by the car, sitting on the sidewalk a few blocks away. Carla took her immediately to the woman in the green house, who said that Nina also needed a migration to survive. Upon hearing this information, Amanda is distraught. She begs David to intervene so that Nina’s spirit might be moved to a body nearby. He tells her there is nothing he can do, and Amanda feels the rescue distance between Nina and herself pulling tighter and tighter until it snaps. She understands she is about to die, and David tells her he wants to show her one last thing.

Amanda sees her husband driving through the town and arriving at Carla’s house. He knocks, and Omar answers. Amanda’s husband wants to speak to him because Nina is different after her ordeal, and he thinks Omar might know why. Omar has no answers, and when David appears, he tells Amanda’s husband that he would also like to know what happened to his child. As Amanda’s husband prepares to leave, David climbs into the backseat, hugging Nina’s stuffed toy and staring imploringly up at Amanda’s husband. Omar pulls the boy out, and the other man drives away. As he heads back to the city, he drives past soy fields, factories, dried-up streams, and endless cars. He doesn’t pay attention to these things, missing their potential danger.