"And girls in threes, I think, are always dangerous," she says. The Fever revolves around three close friends. Abbott says she was fascinated to find out that some of the girls were cheerleaders together. Since it spread to other students, it was also considered mass hysteria. In real life, doctors diagnosed it as conversion disorder, believed to be psychological stress that is converted into physical problems. In her novel, the girls' spasms often begin with seizure-like attacks in front of their peers. The accounts gave Abbott all kinds of ideas about what it might be like for those teenagers. More than a dozen students at the same high school - most of them girls - started having uncontrollable spasms and Tourette's-like tics. We're still figuring everything out and there's this intensity to it."Ībbott - who's in her early 40s - was riveted by the TV news stories about a group of teenagers in Le Roy, N.Y. I feel like that's sort of the time when our emotions are at their peak.
She says, "I've always heard that Freud said that we're all kind of arrested at a certain age, and I'm embarrassed to say I think for me it's about 14 to 15 years old. The Fever is Abbott's third mystery set in the emotional world of teenagers, a place she admits she's a little stuck in herself. Now, Abbott has taken pieces of that true story and turned it into a chilling new novel. A few years ago, she was one of the millions of people captivated by news stories about a strange illness that seemed to consume a town in upstate New York. That's what happened with mystery writer Megan Abbott. Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction, so it makes sense that novelists get some of their best stories from the headlines. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Fever Author Megan Abbott
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