After the last Antarctic icecaps melt in the year 2197, catastrophe ensues. Radically transformed landscapes lead to the unprecedented spread of disease, birthing the ghastly "virofinance" exchange--a burgeoning market for corporations and speculators to monetize pandemics and reap the rewards of global suffering.

It's in this filthy future, one for whose inhabitants words such as "winter" and "cold" have no meaning, the dengue child grows.

The monstrous humanoid mosquito emerges in newly tropical Argentina, carrying its namesake virus and despairing of its own existence. A small tyrant called El Dulce leads vile and brutish classmates to visit brutalities on the child, abuses that cruelly compound an already chaotic state of emotional and physiological turmoil. But biology can only be denied for so long, and once a moment of violent revelation and transformation erupts, its shockwaves extend far beyond the schoolyard, out into a world full of other terrors and wonders enabled and exposed by the thaw.

Powerful telepathic pebbles from the bowels of the earth, purloined by smugglers, seem to recapture the wisdom of the planet's infancy. A multinational planetary engineering firm promises to transform the landscapes of Argentine Antarctica, Mars, Jupiter, and its satellites to meet the demands of international tourism. And an immersive, addictive video game, Christians vs. Indians, suggests a virtual reality far more livable than its terrestrial counterpart.

Written in frenetic, delirious prose that "illuminates the strangeness of everything that surrounds us" (Valeria Luiselli) and follows in the footsteps of Kafka, Cronenberg, Octavia E. Butler, and Philip K. Dick, Michel Nieva's brilliant, hilarious, and demented Dengue Boy draws on manga, body horror, and gaucho-punk science fiction to wonder, darkly: if capitalism has destroyed nature, can it use its own methods to rebuild it?