Book Review: The Devil Takes You Home (2022)
Mulholland Books
(this review contains minor spoilers and adult language.)
Gabino Iglesias has been on my radar for some time, and when The Devil Takes You Home garnered the Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel earlier this year, I tossed my reading list and grabbed the title from its place in the ever-churning stack of novels that loom monolithic at the corner of my desk.
I made the right choice to prioritize this work, as it’s a flagship example of what I think will be the foremost hallmark of popular horror for the next decade or so: novels wherein our personal tragedies as well as the sociopolitical battles of our time are married with otherworldly frights to produce fiction that feels dangerously close to real life. The best horror has always included ghastly elements which could be just beyond our ability to perceive in day-to-day life, and The Devil Takes You Home does this exceptionally well.
Like a growing number of popular horror novels, this novel takes the position that it’s not enough to be traditionally scary, to conjure ghouls and monsters that crawl out from the dark places and threaten mortal lives. No, now it seems that what readers fear most must be rooted in reality, as evil as any esoteric demon or creepy clown, but also a tangible, crudely familiar terror that many experience at some point in their lives: poverty, discrimination, marginalization, so on. Quite simply, with each passing generation, we in the Western world fear the evils of the unknown less and less, instead turning weary eyes to the darkness which spills forth from the cracks in our own society, a corruption which has always been there but from which we are collectively, in unbroken legacy with those who came before us, seeking some exit.
As a reader and critic, I did not enjoy the entirety of this novel, nor agree with much of the rhetorical worldview presented by the main character, Mario, but I did appreciate and respect the story Gabino Iglesias elected to tell. I found tremendous humanity in his words, heartbreaking representations of human grief, and piercing honesty in the perspective of social reality he presented.
Broken Bootstraps
In the opening lines of the novel, Mario’s four-year-old daughter, Anita, is diagnosed with cancer. The disease is caught early, a seemingly routine case according to the white doctors, and as a man who has scrimped and saved to crawl his way up the lower rungs of the American Dream, Mario has faith at the outset; while their may be medical bills and moments of uncertainty, he trusts his family will come out the other side of this crisis intact, beneficiaries (at last) of the hard work and sacrifices he and his wife, Melisa, have made.
Only Anita’s case isn’t routine. It’s an uniquely aggressive and resilient form of the disease, and soon it takes Mario and Melisa’s angelito to heaven, leaving them shattered, bereaved adults beset by mountains of medical debt. In search of reprieve, Mario reaches out to an old acquaintance from his shit-job days, Brian, who sets him up with a bush league murder contract and a target who, according to Brian, has earned the bullet Mario will presumably deliver many times over.
Mario completes the task unflinchingly, but sees something he can’t explain in the immediate aftermath: otherworldly, dark worms inhabiting the body of the slain man. In time, his marriage falls apart, and Mario takes on the role of a lowrent hitman full time. As he gains competence in his new profession, an opportunity which he regards as a way back to normalcy emerges: robbing a cartel drug shipment on behalf of a rival. Completing this task will net him enough cash to disappear, start over, and perhaps, regain some part of what he has lost.
Only it isn’t going to be that simple; the strange worms he saw in the wake of his first murder are only the first of the supernatural horrors in his path. What was almost certainly a suicide mission becomes much darker, as Mario’s hardscrabble quest for redemption takes him into the arms of evil as he could not conceive of it before. From the tunnels beneath the U.S. - Mexico border, to a cartel clubhouse inhabited by things worse than narcos, to the home of an abuelita who carries out atrocities that are among the most unsettling in modern literature, Mario walks the darkest roads of the West Texas borderland in the hopes of finding his way back to a life that was lost.
Tales From a Borderland
Read almost any review of The Devil Takes You Home and you will see polarized commentaria on the bilingual construction of the novel as a element which must either be wholeheartedly applauded or decried as obtuse. See, the novel spends most of its time with characters who are native Spanish speakers, and in a wonderful tilt at realism, they often speak Spanish to each other.
My Spanish comprehension is enough that I could follow the conversations and occasionally appreciate the craft of the writing, but I can see how this would be very frustrating for a (…probably white) audience without these language skills. Early editions of the novel included a translation guide, and why this wasn’t made available on the publisher’s website for later readers is beyond me. While I personally didn’t struggle to read the novel in its intended form, I do wish there was a available means for those whose Spanish skills are lacking or absent.
It’s a curious decision from a narrative perspective, as I came away from this novel with the more or less intact conclusion that this book is–at least in large part—written for a white/Anglo audience. Iglesias takes time to highlight and articulate the etymological and sociolinguistic Spanish variations in the context of their geographic origins, and offers a lot of explanations and declarations which are keenly aimed at both explaining these to a white reader and making them acutely aware of any ignorance they brought to the novel. Moreover, the key plot points are all mapped out in English, though the Spanish passages offer valuable insight into the feelings, perceptions, and motivations of the core characters. Personally, I loved the dual language usage in the passages, and feel that Iglesias, despite choosing a challenging road, wove the two languages into a single narrative expertly. The Spanish passages are used to impart subtle or incisive meaning that would be lost in translation, the experience of being able to read the novel as-intended felt like a blessing.
Miedo y Susto
The novel’s strongest aspect is how well it conveys Mario’s anguish, his humanity, and the heartbroken bitterness that rules his thoughts as his life abruptly unravels. Iglesias shows his talent in these moments, and the emotional resonance of the work cuts especially deep if you’re a parent to a small child and or from an economically disadvantaged background (both, in my case). I recognized both the gnawing fear you experience when your child is sick, as well as the dread uncertainty that paws at you when something threatens to drag your hard-won comforts back into the dregs of poverty.
Close behind this are the actual supernatural horror elements, which show up abruptly and in horrific trappings, appearing in a novel that otherwise concerns itself very much with the mundane world. When Mario or his companions brush up against the supernatural, it’s often rooted in Central American occult practices that sometimes marry familiar Christian beliefs with exotic brujería, and this feels so refreshingly different as a reader who has consumed and engaged with so much Anglo-created horror content. I also gained a keen appreciation for how damn creepy some things can sound in Spanish, monikers like La Huesuda just feels so much more foreboding than their English translations (provided you understand them).
While I appreciate these elements when they appear, they are an extracurricular piece of the novel in my opinion. Though a few supernatural setpieces are integral to the plot, more often these horrors takes a backseat, afterthoughts shoehorned in to create some interest when the story gets bogged down with familiar group dynamics, aggressive social commentary, or Mario’s internal monologue. At their worst, this aspect feels a bit incohesive, inserting something spooky to spice up a chapter without seeking a more elegant way to blend with the story.
Cornball Machismo
Much of the story is told in the context of a trio: Mario, our bereaved parent and main character; Juanca, a cartel gang member and the impromptu guide for the big job at the core of the plot; and Brian, a meth-addicted father-to-be who is trying to get clean. We spend a lot of time with this dynamic, and it’s unfortunately a weaker element of the novel. Many of their exchanges become tedious, testosterone-soaked ‘fuck-you’-offs that add little to the narrative or character development. The characters are just infinitely more interesting on their own.
Worse, a key plot point in which Mario is drawn into conflict with one of his partners is propagated on nothing more than a passing accusation. It’s a tension that defines much of the latter half of the novel but is never actually supported by any evidence beyond a perceived shift in body language, a perceived tick, a gnawing suspicion ultimately corroborated by nothing. This element of the novel felt amateurish, and not for the only time, perhaps something inserted in a later draft to create drama. At no point did I actually believe Mario’s suspicions were well-founded, and the fact that this is a driving plot point for much of the novel is befuddling. This was particularly hard to accept because Mario is a distinctly intelligent character, and I found it wholly unbelievable that someone who had been so sharp in other contexts would act so unconvincingly in this one.
Kicking over the Melting Pot
Among the demons, zombies, and brujas that bring terror to the pages of the novel is something far more nefarious: caricatured white people and their legacy of discrimination. From the opening chapter in which a doctor is branded racist for explaining what bone marrow is to Mario and his wife, to the cosplay paramilitary militia members who help Mario and his group take on the cartel, to the meth-head friend Brian who gets Mario involved in contract killing and then serves as a vessel for scolding for the remainder of the novel, we see only the worst from non-brown people in this novel.
At first, I hoped this to be some sort of inversion of stereotyping: showing the reflection of the lazy day laborer, the gangbanger, the whatever else Latino/a stereotype. Perhaps even more clever, embody the hate of racism and turn it against the traditional offenders. But neither case really seemed to play out. Honestly, it just seemed like Mario hated white people and wanted to paint them at their worst and with the broadest brush available.
I certainly wasn’t offended by this—Mario is a character from a group that suffers regular discrimination and he had been through a hell of a lot, but I was a bit bored with the rote rhetoric in which it was presented.
I spent a lot of time reflecting on this element, and ultimately came away looking at this aspect of the novel as Iglesias showing his white audience the unique discriminations perpetrated against Latino/as in the United States. Be it the lowkey expectation to translate speech to English, blatant job discrimination, or outright risk of being hunted like game by weirdo vigilante militia types on the southern border, Iglesias held up a piercing mirror to this stripe of hardship, intelligently highlighting the ways in which people are made different by the color of their skin, no matter the variations in our privilege, upbringing, or perspectives.
But as a critic and a reader, I found his rhetorical approach to these issues completely ineffective. More often than not, it felt like reading tweets, the kind that dredge up things that are ugly or racist just so that hundreds of other people will join the condemnation dogpile. Everyone leaves more angry, perhaps feeling more justified in embracing the hate they feel, righteous or otherwise. I don’t know what this accomplishes, besides doling out healthy draughts of self-interested indignation. I gained no new perspective.
In one instance, Mario and his companions are harassed by a couple of Trumper types in a restaurant, with the white aggressors going so far as to walk over to their table and effectively tell them to go back to their country (the Latinos present are, of course, U.S. citizens). Juanca, a cartel gang member who has his face covered in tattoos and has tortured and killed innocent people for his bosses, follows them into the parking lot. Pistol in hand, Juanca proceeds to confront the racists and…as a guy who is thus far depicted as being straight fucking cholo…breaks into an jarringly out-of-place rant about racism where he sounds like a first year college student going for a degree in diversity studies:
‘From now on, whenever you see a brown person, you will keep your fucking ugly mouth shut. Whenever you interact with someone named Martínez, García, Vázquez, Rodríguez, Torres, Hernández, Morales, Pérez, González, Sánchez…whatever, you will be nice to them. The pinche frontera crossed us first pendejo, so don’t ever send anyone back anywhere. This land isn’t yours; this place is ours. Esta no es tu pinche casa. Next time your little white supremacist bullshit pop into your head, remember your family came here on a fucking boat not that long ago. And then remember a brown man had you crying like a stupid little bitch in a parking lot after knocking out two teeth from your stupid mouth, you go that?’ [page 130]
…this from a guy who cuts off people’s feet so that they bleed to death on behalf of a drug cartel. Spare me. As a reader, it just didn’t fit at all, and I had to roll my eyes. This wasn’t creating a unique or interesting character (which Juanca actually is), this felt like Iglesias inserting something from Twitter into a very real and serious situation in his book. It was just so damned incongruent from a reader’s perspective that I didn’t really know what to do with it. To make matters worse, instances like this pop up a number of times throughout the novel, and they always feel out-of-place.
I get that some brown people are probably really happy to read passages like that (real talk: most of them probably have a cuchara de plata between their teeth). I don’t discredit the legitimacy of the sentiment, just the bloviating rhetorical style in which it is delivered. I have to judge these things as a critic of narrative because they matter in the context of literature. Most of the sentiments on race in this book felt like they came straight from social media, statements and observations so devoid of nuance that it felt like they were put in the novel just so that people too caught up in their own indignation would nod their heads when they read it. It felt performative.
To be clear–because I have to be clear on these things–I don’t have any disagreement over the content of Señor Iglesias’s sentiment about race in Los Estados. I believe there are a lot of shitty white people out there, and they have been empowered in recent times to embrace and proliferate their misguided and evil doctrines. I have no qualms with the content of Gabino’s writing, only the style in which it is presented, as I feel such was often ham-fisted, cartoonish, and depressingly fatalistic. If there was something valuable to grasp from that, I am genuinely sorry that I wasn’t sharp enough to see it.
Ultimately, the ad hominem appeals and brutalized anecdotes about how shitty is to be a brown man didn’t make me think harder. Wallowing in social horrors and loudly articulating how crappy white people are doesn’t move me near as much as seeing bad gringos defied, undermined, and defeated, but I know that a lot folks on the internet really respond to the narrative devices Iglesias has employed. It just wasn’t for me.
Closing Thoughts
The Devil Takes You Home is a dark, affecting, and effectively miserable novel where the protagonist is haunted by real-world monsters far nastier than those he glimpses across the veil. Every chapter is heavy with his pain, his corrupting bitterness, and like the best works of literature, part of this seeps from the pages and into the readers. It’s a horror novel that puts a magnifying glass on social ills, and inserts in a few well-executed but largely inconsequential supernatural moments to shore up the occasionally flagging narrative. It is a powerful work of human emotion, and my criticisms withstanding, is probably the most memorable novel I have read in a decade.
Verdict: 7.4/10
Strengths
Heartfelt personal narrative with a strong, intelligent, interesting, gloriously imperfect main character
Well-crafted setting with sharp, authentic prose
Quietly elegant in its construction, despite the faults I have articulated in this review. I can immediately put myself back in Mario’s shoes just thinking of this novel, and likely will be able to do so for years to come
Decidedly creepy when it wants to be
Weaknesses
Some dodgy plot points and motivations; more style than substance
Core character group has little chemistry on the pages
Articulation of social ills feels rhetorically pithy
Spooky stuff, while well done, feels like a subplot
You can pick up a copy on Amazon, or preferably, at an independent bookstore in your community.
You may also like: We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, American Dirt, A Black and Endless Sky
