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The Guardian
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva review – revenge of the giant humanoid mosquito
Argentina, 2272. The Argentine Pampas, the grassland prairies that make up much of the country's interior, have been flooded by a rising sea. The landscape of lakes and glaciers is now an archipelago of tropical islands. Rechristened the Pampas Caribbean, it's one of the planet's few remaining inhabitable regions and, as a result, prime tourism real estate. Dengue Boy attends summer camp on the public beaches of the Victoria Interoceanic Canal, a toxic dumping ground that incubates epidemics and aberrations. One day, the boys form a circle and pull their dicks out in one of those exploratory preteen rituals. Dengue Boy hesitates, because Dengue Boy is a giant, humanoid mosquito, inexplicably born to a human mother in a post-apocalyptic slum. And mosquitoes don't have dicks. 'Is it true your mom was raped by a mosquito?' the kids taunt. Published in the original Spanish in 2023, this is the English-language debut of Argentinian author Michel Nieva, beloved at home as the king of 'gauchopunk' style. The portmanteau refers to his playful use of national symbols and his rebellious disregard for high-low distinctions. The book is classic dystopian pulp: global warming, pandemics, radioactive mutation; rich people surviving in climate-controlled enclaves; poor people living short, wretched lives. But it's also a wildly original anti-capitalist satire: this world is run by conglomerates such as Ebola Holding Bank and Influenza Financial Services, which speculate on emergent pandemics even as they eliminate swaths of humanity. Smugglers traffic contraband such as 'sheepies', lab-grown, semi-sentient sexual organs. At one point, Dengue Boy's classmate encounters a telepathic stone unearthed from beneath Antarctica's melted ice, which he plugs into his gaming console, connecting him to the omnipotent primordial force of the universe. Such unhinged flights of fancy are everywhere in the novel, each one gorier or more perverted than the last. Littered among them are magpie references to Kafka, Philip K Dick and Borges (one chapter takes place in a video game inside a video game, a cheeky remix of Borges's most celebrated device). Time here is fluid and continuous, with past and future forming an ouroboros that nods to both magical realism and trippy China Miéville-style sci-fi. But Nieva's intervention into the genre goes deeper than form – all the way down to the novel's conceit. Rather than simply subjecting Dengue Boy to the horrors of surviving the Capitalocene, Nieva finds a more productive use for his protagonist, which is to exact revenge on those responsible. In that opening scene on the radioactive beach, docile Dengue Boy is finally pushed to the edge. His killer animal nature awakens, and with it, an epiphany: 'In the species Aedes aegypti,' he realises, 'only the females bite, suck and transmit diseases, while the males devote themselves to the mechanical process of copulation and siring. With relief, with childlike awe, she understood that her entire life had been determined by a grammatical error.' Rise, Dengue Girl. This transformation sets the novel's revenge plot in motion, and readers will invariably cheer as she eviscerates the ringleader bully with her beak, like 'tearing open a blood sausage'. Terrified by her own monstrosity but seized with insatiable bloodlust, Dengue Girl takes flight and sets off on a rampage, vowing to 'assassinate and infect the rich people and foreign tourists who had caused her mother, and, by proxy, her, so much woe'. First stop? Santa Rosa, where her mother works, a not-so-distant stand-in for real-life hotbeds of stinking beachfront affluence such as Miami. Leaving a trail of blood and pestilence, she eventually decides to halt the machine by confronting the book's final boss: Noah Nuclopio, CEO of Influenza Financial Services and other nefarious profiteering corporations. The showdown takes place aboard a mining base in the Antarctic Caribbean, where Nuclopio is extracting telepathic minerals to become the galaxy's richest man. It's all delightfully whimsical and absurd, but the core drama – capitalism's discontents coming home to roost – couldn't be more realistic, especially as we await the trial of another CEO assassin: Luigi Mangione. Here, in the realm of fantasy at least, there's no question as to whether our hero is righteous. Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery, is published by Serpent's Tail (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, buy your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
WIRED
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
This Weird, Fleshy Novel Is Exactly What You Need Right Now
Feb 5, 2025 1:12 PM Dengue Boy , a book about a humanoid mosquito taking his revenge in the dying years of planet Earth is unsettling and essential. Photo-Illustration:If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED 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 in California. The 'Argentine Caribbean,' meanwhile, remains a comparatively balmy year-round average of 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius). It is little surprise, then, that developers have been busy terraforming the Antarctic Caribbean, engineering whole biomes to recreate little slices of Earth on, uh, Earth. For a flat fee, clients can choose packages of five, 10, or 20 species to populate their biome en masse. Who cares about one Amazon rainforest when you can make 30? Courtesy of Profile Books Buy this book at: If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Humanity is hanging on, more or less, like a bug on the underside of rock. On the other side of the rock are the privileged children of the viroeconomy (more on that later). These kids plug themselves into virtual headsets and immerse themselves in conquest fantasies like the game Christians v Indians 2. One character fantasizes about getting hold of sheepies: near-sentient fleshlights with endless orifices to explore. Some have whole cupboards full of the things. I mention the sheepies not to be prurient, but because they get something across about the strangeness of Dengue Boy . It's all very fleshy. Heads splitting, tentacles plunging, innards becoming outards—the book is a riot of bodily sensations. One might call the book 'climate fiction,' in that it is set in a world clearly in the death spiral of climate catastrophe, but this would undersell the novel's heady weirdness, which skips across economics, sexuality, biology, and temporality without ever really drawing breath. Any novel in which the protagonist finds themselves in an insect body draws the inevitable comparison to The Metamorphosis . The book's inside flap describes Dengue Boy as an 'extraordinary, Kafkaesque portrait of a demented future.' But in Kafka's novella, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous bug; his immense pain comes from his knowledge of what he once was, and the life he would like to crawl back to. Dengue Boy was always Dengue Boy. He has no transformation with which he must come to terms. It is the outside world that must be brought to know him. 'Where his mother would have liked to see pudgy arms, his wings sprouted out, their nerve endings like the varicose veins of a disgusting old man, and where his mother would have liked to hear chuckles and adorable yelps, there was only a constant, maddening buzz that would drive even the most tranquil soul to despair.' In The Metamorphosis , Gregor Samsa's transformation is a one-way street. But Dengue Boy will go through a whirlwind of changes, like evolution working in fastforward, until it's not clear exactly where time or fact or fiction begin or end. In Dengue Boy the billionaire class are not tech bros, but speculators on the so-called viroeconomy, who bet on which disease is about to take off and make a killing stockpiling would-be cures. Along with the developers who build resorts on the ground ceded by retreating ice caps, they are the only real winners in the disaster economy. It takes a certain kind of person to see a landscape riven by destruction and see an opportunity for luxury condos. Which all sounds a bit depressing, except Nieva's visceral, surreal prose—translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery—is anything but. This is a book that takes the awful strangeness of the world and it explodes it into something that is both terrible and impossible to look away from. It reminded me of the final scene of the movie Pearl , in which Mia Goth faces the camera with a rictus grin that drags on and on, until she is sobbing, slowly unravelling into a grimace of deep despair while the end credits play out. Dengue Boy plays this trick in reverse. It is a grimace that turns into a grin. It is a camera shot that spins around so many times that you're not sure if it's the director or the actor you're looking at, and in any case you feel queasy or are you just giddy with excitement? It is weirdness sliced up, spun in a salad spinner and served with some indescribable gunk on top. It's delicious, if you can stomach it.
