The Fever by Megan Abbott
My rating: 4/5 cats
oh, megan abbott.
she does such a good job of writing bad girls.
i have loved her neo-noir books with their saucy femmes fatales, but her last three books have all been contemporary fiction spilling all the secrets of mean girls and their strategies or laying bare the dark side of the modern teenage girl’s coming of age and entrée into sexuality. this one does both.
it’s a crawly story of an epidemic that begins plaguing the girls, and only the girls, of one suburban high school, causing seizures, hallucinations, and a community-wide panic. is it a result of the polluted lake nearby, with its urban legends and fluorescent algae? is it a side effect of the HPV vaccination to which the girls have been strongly encouraged to submit? or is it something more insidious and supernatural in nature? the not-knowing is what drives this story, as more and more girls succumb, while the boys treat it all like one grand joke.
“You’re all going down.” The other boy laughed, beats thrumming through the open mouths of his headphones. “One by one.”
which is echoed by deenie’s earlier observation about the loss of virginity amongst the other girls in the school:
Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None. Every Monday, another girl’s debut.
in this way, the epidemic seems to be tied in some way to female sexuality, as the novel keeps emphasizing the onset of the illness with the sexual histories of the girls. deenie has just lost her virginity, unexpectedly, to someone she feels guilty about having attracted. as her closest friends are taken ill, she keeps her secret, feeling that it is all somehow her fault as she remains unaffected.
it’s a tight and haunting story as the situation escalates, and abbott does a fantastic job creating the life of a close-knit community and its secrets and crimes. as we learn more about the people making up the community; the social and sexual politics of high school girls, the long-incubated romantic yearnings, the failures of parents and the helplessness of a town in crisis, the story becomes much larger than i had anticipated, and once again she has managed to convey perfectly that particular minefield that is adolescence. another dark and bloody gem from megan abbott. if you have never read her, it’s time to remedy that.
