Samanta Schweblin

In this bizarre and disturbing novel, a football-sized electronic toy becomes the latest craze, but the dark side of the fad is that the toys, called kentukis, carry cameras and their movements are controlled by a "dweller" -- a human being who may be half a world away. The owners of the toys -- "keepers" -- are aware of this, and yet allow the kentukis access to the most intimate moments of their lives, talking to them and forming attachments as one would for a beloved pet.

The novel's show more structure is episodic and erratic, bouncing from one dweller-keeper set to another, and ends with most of the partnerships dissolving in violence or humiliation.

If it works at all, it's as a cautionary tale about the evolving relationship between humans and their machines, and the blurring of lines between living and virtual reality. show less

This is a book that should not have worked for me.

It has everything I usually resist:

fragmented structure
surreal logic
conversations that don’t behave like real dialogue
a constant sense that the ground is shifting under your feet

And yet…it absolutely worked.

From the first page, the novel feels like being pulled into someone else’s mind at the exact moment it is failing. The story unfolds as a conversation between Amanda and a boy named David, but it doesn’t read like a conversation. show more It reads like an interrogation, or maybe a forced reconstruction. He keeps her on track, stripping away anything unnecessary, pushing her toward one thing: understanding what happened.

That structure creates something very specific. This isn’t a ghost story, and it isn’t even really a mystery in the traditional sense. It feels more like the final thoughts of a dying woman trying to check every box before she disappears:

Is my child safe?
What caused this?
Where did it begin?

The book never gives you stable footing. There are hints of environmental poisoning, hints of something almost folkloric with the woman in the greenhouse who can “transfer” illness, and hints that none of these explanations are complete. Instead of resolving that tension, the novel lets both exist at once, which makes it deeply unsettling.

What stayed with me most is the idea of control. Amanda believes in something she calls “rescue distance,” a way of measuring how far she is from saving her child if something goes wrong. It’s a comforting framework, but the book quietly dismantles it. You can be vigilant, careful, attentive—and still be too late. Or worse, there may never have been a moment where you could have changed the outcome at all.

There’s also a colder layer underneath that I can’t shake. The children who “survive” may not be the same, but the book never lets us fully see that from their perspective. The loss exists mainly for the adults. From the inside, it may just feel normal. That asymmetry is more disturbing than anything overtly horrific.

I wouldn’t call this a traditionally satisfying read. It’s disorienting, unresolved, and deliberately unstable. But that instability is exactly why it works. It feels less like reading a story and more like being placed inside a system that is breaking down in real time.

Somehow, despite being everything I usually avoid, I loved it. show less

An unsettling pleasure.
These stories each approach their worlds with eerie humor and rich horror - like Clarice Lispector writing a Flannery O'Connor short or Shirley Jackson writing as Bruno Schulz. Inventive, alluring, surprising, and still with the feeling of inevitability. Vibrant, strange, and supremely enjoyable.

Strange, disturbing, intense, with a building suspenseful creepiness, this is not so much a horror novel as a warning:

“And while we wait, we have to find the exact moment when the worms come into being.

“Why?

“Because it’s important, it’s very important for us all.”

Amanda is lying in an emergency clinic, having a conversation with the boy David, who may or may not be part of her fever dream. David is not her child; Nina is her child, from whom she is acutely aware of “the show more rescue distance,” which she feels like a rope that goes taut when that distance becomes too great. What’s happened to Nina is one source of Amanda’s, and our, increasing alarm.

David encourages Amanda to remember and relate events leading up to her current condition but constantly admonishes her when she lingers over what would seem to be a crucial detail:

“None of this is important. We’re wasting time.”

There is a point that is very important for Amanda to become aware of, and her time is very limited. And lest you think this is a garden variety ghost story or tale of supernatural horror, it’s not. That it successfully induces an atmosphere of horror is part of its genius. show less