Fever Dreams of a Parasite by Pedro Iniguez

Hi friends and readers. Today I come to you with another Netgalley review, this time for a book that I became very passionate about. The book is FEVER DREAMS OF A PARASITE, by Pedro Iniguez, which goes on sale March 13, 2025.

 

I first became aware of Pedro Iniguez's work through Beyond the Bounds of Infinity, where I found much love for his piece of short fiction included within that collection. I jumped at the opportunity to read his own collection of work being released this year as soon as I saw it on Netgalley, and I could not have been more impressed with it.

I'm going to do my best to stick away from spoiler territory, but I want to at least mention two works that I found both exuberant and stuck with me after I read them: The Body Booth and The Last Train out of Calico.

The pacing, the descriptions, and the cast of characters within both works, as well as the world built around them, were stellar. I immediately found a lot of empathy and could see myself in the main character of The Body Booth, Yazmina Mejia, despite that I am not a single mother, or pregnant. That said, her experience as a single mother, and the compassion she shared for the monstrous creature within the story, and further her horror and despair was immediately something I connected with. As well, I love a mad scientist character, and Doctor Andrzej Severin did not disappoint. He was meticulous, calculating, and detached, and provided the perfect foil to Yazmina's compassionate persona.

As well, the world built around The Last Train out of Calico left me wanting for more. I wanted to chew this story apart and swallow it down, absorb it, and let it become one with me. The entire range of characters having a final showdown with this alien thing left me feeling terrifically inspired-- I saw this story, and immediately, my brain started turning, and that's how I know a story is great to me. It gives me the push of inspiration I am desperate for to work on my own stories. I love a well written, exploratory weird western, and I got everything I could have wanted and more from this story.

 

My review in full found on Storygraph is pasted in below.

Fever Dreams of a Parasite by Pedro Iniguez is a masterly crafted collection of works that explores the fragility of the human condition in ways that I feel like I have not seen explored before. There were very few stories in this collection that left me unaffected, and a handful of stories felt like a punch to the gut, while others made me so uncomfortable in my own skin that I wanted to crawl right out of it (The Body Booth, anybody?).

I want to do this review justice, but I need to express first and foremost that after reading Iniguez's work in this collection, I've become a passionate reader and long term fan of his. I felt so exposed reading through each story, and it was clear from every word on the page that Iniguez is passionate about human rights and the human condition. He is empathetic to the plight of all people, and that's both admirable and clear within his work.

Another point of interest with Iniguez's work that I found fascinating was how it felt like he carefully leads the reader to a conclusion that, by the end of the work, becomes false. He quite literally yanks the rug out from under our feet in almost every story in a way that we are given very little time to accept this rug-pull and are left feeling disoriented and lost. Sometimes I don't feel as though those endings are as effective as others, but with many stories, I could not have predicted which direction I was being led until I arrived to the conclusion. I find that highly skillful to pull off repeatedly.

Pedro Iniguez is also highly skilled in how he crafts his descriptions. In this regard, I can describe him as a painter. The imagery he is able to convey in his writing is phenomenal, hellish, invigorating. I also found that Iniguez is bold, and very much unafraid to give us a view into the bad end of his characters. He is unafraid to explore characters who are deplorable, and he is unafraid to put those as the main focus of a story.

It is not lost on me that Pedro Iniguez's best work is longer form, when a story has the ability to grow into itself and pull you the reader in with it. His longest stories in this collection are my two favorites, and I hope to see full length novellas from Pedro some day. I will continue to eat his work up without abandon.

My favorite stories in this collection were the ones that spoke to the human condition in an empathetic and horrific manner. My loudest shoutouts go to:

The Body Booth
The Last Train out of Calico
Body of Work; or, The Fever Dreams of a Parasite
Skins

Thank you so much to Pedro Iniguez, Netgalley, and Raw Dog Screaming Press for this early copy.

 

I fear if I don't get to read more of Pedro's works immediately I might self combust.
B.