Heart Fever

After his much-acclaimed short story collection Dangerous Obsessions, which had war as a common background, Belgian/Flemish author Van Laerhoven surprises again with five stories that shed a piercing light on our most self-destructive impulses. A steroid-spiked Syrian mercenary of Bashar-al-Assad is determined to become a "martyr," after the loss of his right arm by "friendly fire." A retired London tube-driver becomes obsessed by his desire to revenge the vicious killing of his parents in Croatia on his half-nephew. A Belgian travel-writer gets entangled in the madness of the Kosovo-war during the nineties and witnesses its dramatic consequences many years later in New York. A jaded art brut painter in Brussels betrays his best friend, a Rwandan art forger, to the Mafia, opening the door to guilt, lust, and murder. A born liar with the nickname Johnny di Machio seeks in the seventies, in Poona, India, salvation in Bhagwan's ashram for his sexual problems, but gets trapped in a maze of long hidden violence.
Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World (1932): ""Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly ---- they''ll go through anything." This is precisely what Van Laerhoven does, relentlessly exposing our inner solitude and voracious egos. Heart Fever goes way beyond heartache.