A Brutal, Beautiful Ride: Reviewing Gabino Iglesias' "The Devil Takes You Home"

Devastation from cover to cover... A story of a man who lost everything, became a monster and confronted bigger monsters - what a genuine adventure.

My own adventure with Gabino Iglesias began a couple of years ago reading the much-acclaimed, sublime Coyote Songs which consists of rotating stories focusing on a handful of characters around the US-Mexican border. Written in the time of Trump's presidency, this little book just blew me away back then. His writing reminds me a little of Quentin Tarantino, but if he could write good films with anti-racist commentary. The Devil Takes You Home is accordingly nothing short of monumental.

We follow main character Mario who loses his daughter to leukemia; his wife to the grief of a child and consequently his financial belongings to the US health system. Buried in debt, he takes a job as a hitman where he discovers his natural "talent" for this endeavor. Concluding that he doesn't have much left to lose, he chooses to participate in one last big heist: to hijack a cartel’s cash shipment together with insider Juanca and drug addict Brian. If he completes the mission he will not only cash in $200,000, he will also have survived a trip full of obscure characters, poverty, misery, inexplicable creatures and ruthless humans.

Every ugliness and brutality on this earth is presented to us readers in Iglesias' gorgeous, stunning, striking prose – so much that there were moments when I found myself awed and fascinated by the beauty of words describing someone shot in the head. A paradox that confused me and made me doubt myself! This is a road story so brutal, so ugly that in a conventional novel the horror and hostility of the setting and the background of The Devil Takes You Home alone would be the peak, the punchline. In contrast to the brutality caused by humans the supernatural elements almost felt like a welcome relief to me, a familiar rescue from so much reality or verisimilitude.

I need to add that at no point did I feel that the violence depicted in this book was glorifying or for violence's sake only. It is important because a dog-eat-dog world does exist. Here the people surviving, even if they are doing things that are hard to grasp for others, aren't only shown, they are literally shoved into our faces reading this, so we cannot ignore them like we do in real life. Take, for example, the story of a grandmother whose disabled grandson was declared “a miracle”, little Milagrito, and people starting to fetishize the boy as a religious figure, asking for, buying a little part of him like a little hair or a nail clipping. She is even ready to negotiate to cut off some more, mind you. How much misery, pain, sacrifice and also affection in this one side-story there is...

As an immigrant myself, I felt the social commentaries scattered in between passages were spot on to me even though I don't live in the USA, confirming how universal injustice and bigoted thinking are - on all sides. I personally found some of these a little over-explained for my taste and would have appreciated a little more “show, don't tell” as maybe some readers would have understood it on a deeper level.

Great plus point: Big chunks of dialogue in this book are in Spanish - the dialogues are as authentic, normal Latinx people would speak to each other! I wish other authors who act like everybody everywhere is speaking American would take a leaf out of that book...

I am not the greatest fan of stories about gangsters or heists but I loved this book nonetheless and not least because of its language and message. It's an important work and I feel very impressed, I will keep thinking about it for some time to come - highly recommended.