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‘Dengue Boy’ Is the Weird, Fleshy Novel You Need Right Now
Dengue Boy, a book about a humanoid mosquito taking his revenge in the dying years of planet Earth is unsettling and essential.
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. 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. 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 unraveling into a grimace of deep despair while the end credits play out.
Or read this on Wired