Seven titles that blur the boundary between fact and fiction

Meg Charlton is a writer based in New York City. Her debut novel Voyagers is now out from Harper. Other work has appeared in The Yale Review, Slate, Lux, Atlas Obscura, and Vice, and the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and covered in Indiewire, Above the Law, and Australian National Radio's Future Tense. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and teaches at Sackett Street Writers.

At Electric Lit Charleton tagged seven books that "live in that borderland of uncertainty, peering over the edge of consensus reality into the irresolvable." One title on the list:

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Structured as a kind of cross-examination between a dying woman named Amanda and a young boy named David, Fever Dream retraces the events that led to Amanda’s mysterious illness. “Keep going, don’t forget the details,” David urges. But as the details accrete, the investigation grows only more unsettling and irresolvable. Why does David insist certain seemingly minor moments are essential while others are deemed irrelevant? Is David’s interrogation even real? Or is it all in Amanda’s head? And what, exactly, has poisoned David and Amanda both? Ultimately a horror story about parenting, Fever Dream is about the terror of trying to protect a child from the most frightening dangers of all: those you didn’t even know existed.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Fever Dream is among Stephanie Feldman's five scary novels that use setting to embody horror.

--Marshal Zeringue