Fever Dreams of a Parasite by Pedro Iniguez
Raw Dog Screaming Press (March 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Broadbent
All horror is political (Gabino Igelias says it, so it must be true). The best authors hand us stories alongside their politics; it’s only after we’re wowed by their words that we stand back and marvel at the message. And if the author is very lucky, their message hits at the right cultural moment. Their theme becomes not important, but culturally vital. We need their voice. We need them to speak up and speak out. In the midst of this moment, Pedro Iniguez pulls this off with panache in Fever Dreams of a Parasite.
Out March 13 from Raw Dog Screaming Press, this collection feels vital and necessary. Certainly, as the blurb says, its cosmic horror tales echo “Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Langan.” But by using these ideas to illuminate the particular circumstances of the marginalized immigrant, Iniguez makes the tropes his own. This is cosmic horror at its finest: when an author uses it as a lens to discuss larger issues.
And these larger issues? There is cosmic horror endemic in systemic poverty and marginalization. Iniguez’s characters are people who never cease trying — to find a better life, to assimilate, to improve their family’s lives — and yet they are constantly thwarted by terrific forces beyond their control. These forces remain coupled with a terrible beauty. Not a romantic beauty, which would be disingenuous (Iniguez never pretties up poverty, and this is a gritty collection, one with never shies from the realistic ugliness of life), but a loveliness in the prose, a tenacity in the people, a stark splendor in the desert setting. This is not a world without love or hope, and that’s the book’s central tragedy. Hope exists despite these bottomless horrors.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the book’s second story, “Feast of the Dreamer.” Our main character is a former narco assassin on the run from his employers; he yearns to escape the memories of his past sins. He’s found that he can descend in an ecstatic dreamworld by consuming rotted flesh. In part, it’s horrifying. But that horror is coupled with a desperate poignancy and terrible beauty that gutted me. Iniguez forces us to imagine the world that has driven him to this despair. That’s the real horror.
The author manages the same kind of turn in “Shantytown.” A little girl residing in a hopeless Tijuana shantytown muses on the ghosts she and the other children see at night. The story draws to a shattering conclusion, and those ghosts aren’t necessarily what we think. Iniguez uses cosmic horror to shed light on the real-life horrors faced by marginalized people. They’re all the more horrific for their truth.
In the title story, “Body of Work, or Fever Dreams of a Parasite,” we see an artist make the ultimate sacrifice for his art. It’s a story about assimilation and the ways in which people are twisted by oppression. In this book, art can easily carry you away — it also does so in “The Body Booth” — when it twists up with power dynamics and oppression.
And even these stories, like the rest of the collection, remain songs for the marginalized. Iniguez hits the desperation and despair of life on the margins in rich, gorgeous prose with a delicate eye to setting and richly realized character. Even his quick stories, like “Skins” and “Adrift Ebon Tides” hit hard and linger long. This is a collection that isn’t soon forgotten, one that ranges from prehistory (“The Savage Night”) to the ragged days of the Old West (“The Last Train out of Calico”) to the Great Depression (“Midnight Shoeshine”) to the present day. Its settings vary from the Southwestern desert to the inner city, from shantytowns to the Arctic circle. Yet it remains cohesive in theme. That’s tough to pull off.
Tough and gritty. But beautiful nonetheless. Fever Dreams of a Parasite is a singular book, one that wraps real-life horror in lyrical prose and masterful storytelling. At this particular moment, Iniguez is giving a necessary voice to marginalization. We’d do well to listen.
