It is nearly impossible to describe a certain type of reading experience to someone who has never had it. Not particularly frightening. Not so confusing as to be annoying. It’s more like waking up at three in the morning from an unplanned nap, not knowing what day it is, the room being a little too warm, and everything having slightly soft edges. Some books intentionally occupy that area. They are designed to do so. After you discover one, you spend a lot of time pursuing the emotion once more.
There isn’t a clear name for the genre. On forums, readers refer to them as hallucinatory novels, surreal fiction, and fever dream books. There are whole lists on Goodreads devoted to them, as well as reading community threads where people describe the feeling in remarkably similar ways, such as feeling lightheaded, absorbed, or a little detached. Beneath all the bizarre imagery, it’s possible that these books are merely expressing the reality of what consciousness feels like when it is stretched to its breaking point. Fiction typically pretends to be more solid than reality has ever been.
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin is the obvious place to start, in part because the title says it all and in part because the book fully satisfies it. It’s a 200-page novella that is told solely through dialogue between a boy named David and a dying woman named Amanda, unfolding in what seems to be real time inside some sort of delirium. A toxin is present. A child’s soul may or may not have moved into a different body. Every conversation is laced with a mother’s fear. The tension never lets up in Schweblin, which Megan McDowell translated from Spanish. It’s like holding your breath for two hours while reading it and only realizing it when you’re done.
Although Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi operates at an entirely different frequency—quieter and stranger in a kinder way—the disorientation is equally complete. The narrator describes living in a huge, unreal home with statues lining the halls, flooding lower floors due to tides, and an architectural logic that no one outside would understand. The narrator’s composure is what makes Piranesi so powerful. He thinks the house is lovely. With genuine tenderness, he lists the tides. In the meantime, the reader is gradually assembling a reality that the narrator is still unable to perceive. After winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction with her debut book twenty years ago, Clarke virtually vanished until reappearing with this book in 2020. It’s difficult to avoid thinking that the extended silence added to its peculiarity.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer transforms the fever dream into a biological nightmare. People who enter Area X, a quarantined area on an unidentified coastline, suffer consequences. The story is told in a flat, clinical register by the protagonist, a biologist, which only serves to heighten the discomfort of what she describes. The landscapes change. A tower plunges into the ground. Living text is written on the walls. A significant film adaptation of the Southern Reach trilogy was made, but the book is difficult to translate because so much of its power comes from what it withholds. VanderMeer never provides an explanation. He never finds a solution. The point is that refusal.
The one that most resembles a social satire that abruptly and gradually transforms into something else is Mona Awad’s Bunny. At first, the setting—an MFA program at a prestigious New England university—is sufficiently familiar to be humorous. From the periphery of their clique, the alienated protagonist observes the affluent, swooning students who refer to each other as “Bunny” in corny voices. The novel then takes a different turn. After that, it turns once more. When it comes to loneliness, desire, and the unique insanity of creative communities, Awad is doing something truly bizarre, but she does it in a way that makes you laugh until the earth falls away.
As you read these books one after the other, you get the impression that the authors have an unwritten consensus about the purpose of fiction. Not to reassure. not to settle. to apply and maintain a particular type of pressure within the reader’s mind. A teenage runaway, talking cats, fish falling from the sky, and an elderly man who travels the world in a state of peaceful incomprehension are all featured in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, which has been doing this longer than most. Although the logic is internal and coherent on its own terms, it cannot be translated into conventional cause and effect. Murakami’s novels typically elicit either intense devotion or bewildered frustration, and this dichotomy likely indicates whether or not this specific genre of fiction is for you.
It’s still unclear why some readers are particularly drawn to books that don’t settle down—that prioritize atmosphere over explanation, dislocation over resolution. The feeling of being inside a mind that has lost control of the norms may be something that the fever dream novel provides that more structured fiction cannot. In real life, that can be scary. In some way, it seems like the closest thing to dreaming while awake on paper.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.