Nothing is sacred in Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy, not even its own title. In a single year of 2297, when the melting of ice caps has turned the Argentine Pampas into the world’s last inhabitable (and therefore marketable) Caribbean, it takes just 20 pages for the mosquito-human hybrid Dengue Boy to have the epiphany she’s actually Dengue Girl.

Her privates are inside her abdomen, after all, and being a female mosquito gives her the green light to bite the student bullying her for it. To death, obviously. As if there were any doubt how comically gory a book called Dengue Boy was willing to get.

The 205-page Dengue Boy is all sorts of gutsy, overflowing with viscera and sweeping ideas of a steampunk society stratified light years beyond subtlety. Sprawled from Nieva’s O. Henry Award-winning story of the same name, the novel situates Dengue Girl’s existence as a for-profit infectious agent. The snot-nosed rich children of these “virofinance” stockholders blow most of the profits (or in some cases, make them) on VR headsets and recreate 19th century skirmishes between Argentine cowboys and Indigenous peoples of the former Pampas. If you thought the creepypasta lore of Monica Ojeda’s Nefando could use a dash more Cronenberg-esque body horror, you’ll probably play along with this game too.

Reading the blurb on Dengue Boy’s sleeve, unfortunately, might be all you need. The book knows exactly what it wants to say but runs out of space to say it. The prose styling itself is belligerently opposed to all manner of good taste. Aside from some select passages of brilliant body horror, Dengue Boy’s writing style dares you to flag it down with five markers’ worth of red ink.

Never in a hardcover-published book have I been as irritated specifically by the punctuation. Parentheses are used to cordon off past lives – reminisces of Dengue x’s childhood are marked with variations on “Dengue Boy (as she was known back then)” – or to sloppily smuggle in details that can’t fit in such a compacted plot. Also, there are exclamation marks everywhere!

Translator Rahul Bery stands by his decisions to maintain Nieva’s techniques from the original Spanish, as a big middle finger to the rules Orwell codified in “Politics and the English Language.” Credit where it’s due: the straightforward, almost childish mode of narration makes a 200-page book about mosquitoes, Antarctica, virtual reality, and the race to the bottom surprisingly easy to follow. I never felt like anything in this book was happening to me, but I had an acute sense of knowing precisely what was happening to someone else.

The intent of Nieva’s breathless pacing clarifies itself toward the end, where the plot collapses like ice shelves into a mind-melting vortex. Imagine Borges' Aleph as a crystal ball, refracting a universe that hasn’t quite happened yet but seems inevitable, of gender-fluid bug-people and commodified Ebola virus. Dengue Boy bends its pages into a Möbius strip. The end is the beginning is the end again. Giant prehistoric insects have resurged in post-history. Yet the throughline of techno-capitalism marches straight forward.

If you’ve got the stomach for groan-worthy dad jokes delivered over heaps of dead, larva-infested bodies, you’ll find the humor inherent to the slaughter. There’s hardly any sentimentality in this book for the South America that exists in what we call the present. Neither Dengue Girl nor Dengue Boy possess the time in their overbooked schedules for that.