Toxic Bodies, Disturbing Delusions, Ghostly Scenes: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

Abstract

The aesthetics of postmodern Latin American eerie narratives such as Fever Dream (2014) by the daring contemporary Argentinean writer, Samanta Schweblin, materializes the environmental horror genre on a hyperreal terrifying tale about the toxic uncanny in transgenetic soy fields in a rural town. This short novel stages a performative montage, disturbing delusions, moving transtemporal scenes, and an unstable dialogic narrative between dying and ghostly spectral characters. This essay approaches the performative montage as a structural device of the environmental horror narrative engaging the reader-spectator on a speculative interpretation while listening a whispered audio-narration moving back and forth through unstable narrative segments in pursuit of "the exact moment of intoxication." In Samanta Schweblin's writing, the performative montage where a poisoned dying mother remembers eerie and hyperreal recent events coerced by a ghostly transmigrated boy, unfolds an unsuspected vanishing point which redefines "the haunting rescue distance" from her daughter in an environmental horror narrative.