This novel is in turns, hilarious, brutal and profound. Dengue Boy is one of the most original and enjoyable books I've read this year and I cannot wait to recommend it.

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery is a sci fi speculative that is so wild that it hits both levels of freak wild and head tilt wild. I finished reading it last night and my initial thought has remained constant since I fell into the first chapter in that that this book was unlike anything I’ve read before ever.

Some spoilers maybe, but I’m trying to keep it vague.

I went into this book only having seen the cover and having read the synopsis. I was shocked and jarred from page one but the storytelling was compelling. Non linear stories are the best stories, as they really stretch my brain.

It’s got some gore and some very, very uncomfortable parts but the book has something to say about climate change, capitalism, and colonialism, with a focus on the haves and have nots in a world and potential future which magnifies the differences. Dengue is a standout character.

I feel the book is like Carrie meets Aeon Flux meets the Fly meets David Lynch/Cronenberg vibes. It’s the best way I can describe it without spoiling. Again, it’s shocking as hell. Jarring but good sci fi can do that to you.

Want to go on a cli-fi-sci-fi-speculative joyride? Then check your triggers and buckle up. Remember, safety first.

Again, thanks to @astrahousebooks via @netgalley for an advanced copy of the book.

A dystopian revenge story that’ll have you clutching your pearls.

Future publication date February 3, 2025
Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery

You’ll want to read this if
-you loved The Fly directed by David Cronenberg.
-dark humor and body horror intrigue you.
-dystopian/cli-fi is your jam.
-the cover art calls to you. Stunning, right?!

Set in Argentina in 2197, a young dengue boy (half human, half mosquito) grows up in a world where the last of the icecaps have melted and viruses are highly profitable.

Ok, this book is wild!

If this story was just about dengue boy it would qualify as weird, but dengue boy’s only just scratching the surface of the weird that Nieva has in store for you: radioactive burns from the sun, a popular virtual reality game called Indians vs Christians, some kind of mysterious, ancient, and wise element found beneath their feet, and weird futuristic sex, just to name a few other details.

Nieva is brilliant for mashing together body horror, climate collapse, and identity into a story that is ultimately about transformation. But wow did this story gross me out. I was able to forgive some truly nauseating scenes because of how smart and even funny the story is. Overall, this was well written (albeit with a lot of crass language!) and gives the reader a lot to chew on. A+ for keeping me on my toes.

Thank you to Astra Publishing House & NetGalley for the e-arc

3.75

I really love the way this book plays with time and space which wasn’t something I was expecting when I first picked it up. if I were to describe this book in one sentence, it’s like the mountain in the sea meets tender is the flesh. there’s sentient bug/human hybrids, a post climate disaster world, dual timelines and povs, and a lot of commentary on what the world is and how it will turn out if we keep using it the way we do. I really enjoyed the vr element of the story and how the two timelines and povs eventually converge at the end to circle back to everything that happened in the beginning and just generally enjoyed the plot and devices used throughout the whole book. I love books that are extreme hypothetical futures for this planet that then use that idea to comment on our world today. the one thing I wasn’t prepared for/didn’t enjoy as much were the explicit sexual scenes in the book (scenes that were not romantic but rather vulgar and intense and uncomfortable). I know it adds to the book it’s just something I don’t tend to enjoy even if it’s necessary. overall I really enjoyed this book and can’t wait to see more from this author!

I adored every wild ridiculous gloriously absurd word of this novel. It made me laugh a lot. Wonderfully imaginative, absolutely unique, every page seemed to introduce a clash of premises that exploded the story into impossible fragments that spun out in unimaginably unlikely directions and made me happy to be alive at the same time as this book came into being, I mean, how unlikely is that, when considered against the vastness of geologic time?

(A CW for depictions of rape, gore, mentions of genocide, and body horror)
Dengue Boy is born in the poisonous and overheated Argentina of the future where speculation on disease has becoming the prime way of doing business.
A garish, disgusting novel that takes on climate change, extractive capitalism, commodities sexuality, and the open wounds colonialism left on Latin America. Nieva blends Snow Crash, Cronenberg, and Latin American sensibilities into an addicting novel.

okay WHAT ON EARTH did I just read? so.... wow. this book was like.... Metamorphosis mixed with Land of Milk and Honey mixed with a lot of things. An insightful critique of capitalism and humanity's tendency towards self-destruction, through destroying our own planet. Simultaneously, a dizzyingly dark/gross (in a good way) work with a very unique protag. 4 stars. tysm for the arc.

Wow, wow, wow. Dengue Boy reads like a fever dream that takes you over and whirls you into the year 2272 when the polar icecaps have melted and corruption, capitalism, and global warming produce a giant mosquito, killer viruses that are traded on a stock exchange, and a whole trade of priceless iceberg remnants that are tourist attractions.

This novel is funny, addictive, one of the most imaginative fever dreams I've ever had . . . I mean read. Michel Nieva misses nothing in our spiraling culture. I'd ask what drug he was on to write this, but it would be impossible to write this well under the influence of anything but pure inspiration in the hands of a virtuoso.

Thank you to Net Galley and Astra Publishing House for the ARC. I have never read anything like this novel before. And it was incredible. While it is a translation, I love the author's writing style so much. Even though there is a lot of gore and grossness in this book, there is also a lot of humor that makes this an enjoyable read. The world building is intense, we're far far into the future in a setting that's completely unfamiliar to me, yet the author is so good at explaining this world in an interesting and humorous way. The future is scary but I would love to visit this world for like less than a day (any longer and I won't survive). I also love all the POVs, from Dengue Boy, to El Dulce, Rene, and AIS. The POVs tied together really well. I also loved the video game that kids in this world are obsessed with. The way games and reality and timelines tied together was really interesting and trippy. This is a weird book where strange things happen, but the author doesn't hand wave the strangeness, all the pieces tie together really well and the themes really hit you towards the end. This book is both weird and a work of genius. Definitely check out the content warnings before reading this.

A mosquito boy goes around infecting people with dengue fever.

I'm yet to be disappointed by an Argentinian novel translated from Spanish. I don't know what's going on in that country, but the writing is so good.

I think I would've preferred the story to be more focused with a smaller scope. Less exposition and more character voice. But I respect the book for what it is.

Fantastic! Dengue Boy is hands down the best, most deranged fever dream I've ever had the pleasure of reading!

Nieva’s writing is hilarious, poignant, and fast-paced. If you're craving a strange dystopian setting where climate change has made the world largely uninhabitable, the idea of winter is a tourist attraction, and the elite has created a market for viruses, not to mention the fact that the main character is a mutant mosquito/human, give this a read!

Dengue Boy by Michael Nieva

Argentina. The Carribean Pampas, beyond the year 2197, to be more precise. A world lovingly crafted by Michael Nieva, about a mosquito boy struggling to fit into society succombs to quench the thirst for blood and revenge. The narrative discusses climate change and its effects on the economy, which are regulated by large corporations that aim to take advantage of the symptoms of the plague. These big businesses are using the stock market for monetary gain, control, and power. All sounding a bit familiar of modern-day life and told through the life of a hybrid human without a clue as to how they came to be.

I vividly remember the first time watching “A Clockwork Orange.” I was mesmerized at it’s boldness and ruthlessness. The thought of “what am I watching?” streaming through my consciousness. I credit Michael Nieva for going to that place of insanity. I reached for this book, the cover art tantalizing me. Intriguing! This tale was so much more than what I had first pictured. Shrewdly pieced together, layer after layer of sci-fi glory packaged up into the thorax of a human with bug anatomy. A novel that gave me that specific feeling of not quite understanding the sum of all its parts. Rereading important passages to confirm my full understanding. Moving like the gears of a clock, grinding away my resistance to misconceptions, I was challenged. The story takes grip, holding on to my emotional fragility. I am slowly introduced into a world of cruelty. The author is playing on my natural feelings to root for the underdog and stand up for others who no longer have the will to fight, only to witness a devastation I had no idea was coming. Not satisfied with my ego bruised, Nieva goes for the jugular and proceeds to toy with what is left of my pride. I had no clue, is what I kept uttering...

My apologies to Michael Nieva; I had gravely misjudged the potential and magnitude of this book. What you brought forth far surpassed my expectations. A fantastic world wrought with deception, treachery, and redemption awaits. I am giving this 4.5 stars and rounding up to 5 stars. This is something special. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but those with an affinity for the weird and obscure will surely be happy.

Many thanks to Astra Publishing House for the ARC through NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion.

I really liked this one, but the ending did get away from me a bit.

The characters were fresh and exciting. The interweaving of their storylines was COOL. The transition between perspectives was flawless, which I appreciate because some books don’t do this well at all and it totally takes away from the books readability.

This is similar in themes and vibes to Mood Swings, which was one of my favorites this year. Unlike Mood Swings, though, the concept of the plot got a bit too existential for my own comprehension. This might be a lost-in-translation thing, but I digress.

Overall, I recommend picking this one up for sure for its novelty and scope!

Thanks to @astrahousebooks and @netgalley for the digital review copy!

This absurdist satire is disorienting in all the best of ways. I don’t call it absurdist lightly; the jacket copy references Cronenberg and Kafka, but my reading experience led me more directly to Ionesco, the father of the theatre of the absurd. Obviously this isn’t formatted as a play, but the distinct chapters that move across characters, the surreal nature of relationship and transformation, the impossible bending of time and space to point at something more fundamentally true, these all put me in the same mental and emotional space as Ionesco and other absurdist artists.

The story is exploring greed, manifest most resolutely through capitalism, and the ways it sucks the life-force of not just humanity but the very earth itself. It is exploring environmental destruction, addiction, artificial simulation (and stimulation), manufactured-disaster-capitalism, inheritance, and human relationships through time and space. This isn’t a deep-dive into character, but the characters are vehicles for various segments of the disillusioned and destroyed population—the monster, the capitalist, the bully, the pampered—and while the characters are given some inner life what they are really good at is highlighting how a breakdown of human relationship and compassion, exacerbated by unapologetic greed and avarice, affects everyone. The world-building is unhinged and perfect, setting the scene in vacation-brochure clarity, painting a very vivid picture of the world and yet always separating us from it through a layer of artifice. The writing is simple and direct but gets more fevered and discordant as space-time and reality become more permeable, an elegy of euphemism and dissonant metaphors. The dynamic between really simple, direct, declarative language and the absurdity of what is being described is a stylistic touch that is both effective and often hilarious. There are surface-level ideas that are easy to grasp and play with but then folded into this absurdist reality are myriad other ideas, giving the reader an immense amount to sit back and contemplate, such as the very real danger that caring for one another poses to an autocratic-capitalist state.

This novel is consistently funny while serving as a penetrating exploration into where we, as humans living on this one Earth, have been and, more frighteningly, where we seem likely to be going. Very much absurd in style and tone it certainly won’t be for everyone, but for those that vibe with the symbolic and the surreal this short novel is a decadent blood feast.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Astra Publishing House, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

<i>Dengue Boy</i> takes Kafkaesque narrative and puts it on a blast. Set almost two centuries in future, climate change has reduced Earth to a dystopian mess, its people controlled and governed by large corporations. In a small port town, lives a humanoid dengue-virus carrying mosquito looking person whose coming of age and embracing their identity sets off course of this novel.

An insanely wild ride that's like a fever dream on steroids, every page doing something entirely brand new and totally unthinkable, the narration goes here and there and everywhere, almost impossible to predict where Nieva takes the readers next. There are grander narratives present - the essence of human greed that never really goes away, the course of identity evolution that one goes through their life and the human resilience to exist.

This is my first book by Michel Nieva and I am very excited what they will write next.

<i>Thank you to Netgalley and Astra Publishing House for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.</i>

I don’t know where to begin talking about this book. It was so funny and unlike most of what’s out there. I was reminded of ‘Rejection’ by Tony Tulathimutte in its irreverent, ironic tone and absurdist storyline. At first I thought it was going to be a futuristic sci-fi novel, something like Brian Aldiss’ ‘Hothouse,’ but it turned out to be something better. Disgusting for sure, but in a perversely humorous way.

In the year 2272, Antartica has thawed, resulting in parts of the Earth being flooded by the ocean. As expected, the new land was snapped up by corporations, one of which developed a way to terraform any land, be it on Earth or on an extraterrestrial colony like Jupiter. A boy (who is more of a giant mosquito) is born and raised in Victorica, the Pampas Caribbean. Because of his monstrous appearance, he experiences severe bullying and gets nicknamed Dengue Boy. One day, fed up with the mistreatment, his anger awakens bloodlust, making him realise that he’s actually not a boy but a girl, since only female mosquitoes suck blood.

Dengue Girl goes on a murderous rampage at the financial centre, leaving behind thousands of eggs, then goes on a quest for her origin. Anyone she bites succumbs immediately and she’s powerful enough to disembowel her enemies. Paralleling her journey is a flashback to a heinous little boy’s VR videogame journey where he goes on killing sprees and worships a deity, which through the incorporation of a magic stone, becomes the channel through which a real deity comes into being. He also finds out exactly how the mutant mosquito epidemic started—surprise surprise, it’s all because of greedy corporations trying to drive up shares and profit off vaccines. It’s one big time-warp with the timelines all jumbled up, but the ecocriticism is pretty clear.

Completely original, lots of fun, not afraid to shock and take surprising turns. It's crazy and absurd but reads super easily and is still very smart. I am not a big science fiction reader and had to look up the term 'steam punk' but it seems I have been missing out on a brilliant genre. This will be in my top-ten for 2025.

Best to go in blind and not know anything about the plot.

This book was a ride, in the best possible way.
It was so surreal, so meta, so weird, so playful, so brutal and so, so brilliant. I didn’t want to put it down. The plot twisted and turned, moving quickly and covered so much. We follow Dengue Boy/Girl/Void on their quest to find their origins whilst laying waste to humanity, whilst following El Dulche who is playing his game, travelling through time and dimension and honestly, I can not and will not explain the plot, just read it and you will love it.

thank you so much to the publisher for my review copy! this is such a fun read, albeit very dark and bizarre! I have Never read anything like it before.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on February 4th, 2025 by Astra House.

Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy is an unflinching fever dream of a novel, a body horror-laced dystopia where climate collapse and capitalism have fused into something grotesque, irreversible, and deeply personal. In Nieva’s reimagined Patagonia—now a tropical coastline after the Antarctic ice caps have vanished—Dengue Boy, a mutant mosquito-human hybrid, comes of age in a world that was never meant to hold him. A product of reckless bioengineering, born from corporate greed masquerading as progress, he is rejected by his mother, tormented by his peers, and alienated from his own body. But Dengue Boy is not a story of assimilation—it is a story of monstrous reclamation.

As the novel unfolds, Dengue Boy’s identity fractures and reforms in the shape of vengeance. A brutal moment of self-discovery reveals that she is, in fact, Dengue Girl—only female mosquitoes bite. With that knowledge comes a new hunger, one that cannot be contained. She kills her tormentor, El Dulce, and embarks on a killing spree targeting the ultra-wealthy, those who have thrived while the rest of the world drowns in the consequences of their excess. The novel pivots between Dengue Girl’s transformation into the revolutionary Mother Dengue and the machinations of the elite, who have turned climate catastrophe into an economic engine, profiting off engineered pandemics. It is a world where financial speculation is indistinguishable from ecological devastation, where time itself has lost its borders, collapsing into a prelife of telepathic stones and viral mutations.

Nieva’s prose is as visceral as the world he conjures—dense, all-consuming, and steeped in satire. His sentences sprawl and coil, layering scientific jargon with surrealist horror, corporate doublespeak with fevered hallucination. The effect is hypnotic, a slow descent into a world where the grotesque has become commonplace, where revenge is both deeply personal and disturbingly systemic. Dengue Boy operates on multiple levels at once: a body horror Bildungsroman, a decolonial fable, a critique of techno-capitalism’s unchecked greed. It is a novel unafraid to ask what happens when the world turns so deeply against you that the only reasonable response is to burn it all down.

To read Dengue Boy is to confront the reality that the dystopia Nieva imagines is already seeping into our own. It is a novel that festers, lingers, demands to be reckoned with. And in the end, it leaves one question hanging in the thick, humid air: what happens when the monsters bite back?

📖 Recommended For: Readers who enjoy absurdist and dystopian speculative fiction, critiques of hyper-capitalism, and body horror with a philosophical edge; those interested in the intersections of technology, climate collapse, and resistance.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy and Transformation, Climate Catastrophe and Capitalism, Revenge and Resistance, The Commodification of Life.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Rape (minor), Bullying (minor), Animal Cruelty (minor), Sexual Content (minor), Violence (severe), Gore (severe), Blood (severe).

I've never left a review for a book I didn't finish before, but I'm doing so for Dengue Boy, of which I've read just over 50%, for two reasons. First, because I got an ARC from NetGalley and I owe them a review. But second, and much more importantly, it's a really excellent book. Beautifully written, wonderfully imaginative, and wryly humorous, I could see this one becoming a big hit. However, I had to stop reading because it was the most grotesque book I have ever read and I simply couldn't stomach it. This is definitely a case of "it's not you, it's me." I think that if a prospective reader enjoys body horror they will love Dengue Boy and if they don't then they might struggle with it. I wish I could have spent more time in the cynical, post-climate apocalypse future that Nieva has constructed. This future world is wildly inventive and, like much good sci-fi, sheds some light on dark truths in the present day. I can't fully recommend this work, but that's on me; if you think this sounds like your kind of book, I would encourage you to pick it up.

Delighted to include this title in the February edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national lifestyle and culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

This was trippy! Unique voice and style. I had to keep stopping to assess what was going on. I’m sure some things went over my head but all in all it was an entertaining read. I think I would have enjoyed it more as an audiobook.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGallery for letting me read!

DENGUE BOY
@micheltinieblas
Thank you @astrahousebooks for this gifted copy.
Out now!

2025 came in hot with a bunch of bull. What we need: a hero. A hero fitting for this time in history. A hero willing to take it all back and do what needs doing.

Who is that hero?

Dengue Boy.

A raucous rampaging and truly hilarious novel full of futuristic violence, magic(?), video games, blood and rage, Dengue Boy is set 200 years from now after the glaciers have melted and the world is overrun by evil capitalist overlords leeching off society via virofinance manipulations, that is, currency founded on a market based on the likelihood of a new viral outbreak.

Dengue Boy, a human-mosquito hybrid, steps in. After several murders, a few transformations, a low point and some ancient magical knowledge, can they bring peace back to the planet?

This unstoppable novel does it all. It’s fun, funny, weird, gross, etc, but what a RELIEF it is to read dystopian climate sci fi without cliché!!! I didn’t buy into it 100% immediately, but this is why bookstagram is so great—I was able to discuss the novel with a friend, read some resources about it, and I came to understand just how much nuance and brilliance is pouring out of this batty little book.

Don’t come here if you’re squeamish or have certain expectations of how a novel should read in English, and don’t expect any handholding—you’re expected to bring your own vibrant imagination to meet this novel where it is.

Otherwise, just come because it’s a great gory book that will have your brain jumping from profound contemplations of the universe to .. well whatever the opposite of that is (omg sheepies).. oftentimes within the same paragraph. Dengue Boy is incredible. More gaucho-punk, please. Count me as a Dengue Boy fan.