A thrilling, tense journey to hell, as horrific and bleak as the best works of Jim Thompson, Elliot Chaze, and Thomas Harris.
This is the third novel I’ve read by Iglesias, and it’s another “barrio noir,” a subgenre he invented to help market his hispanic crime novels that contain lots of Spanglish. Unlike his previous two barrio noir books, Zero Saints and Coyote Songs, this one features a fairly straightforward crime narrative, basically a heist plot, not a mosaic novel of linked stories with multiple points of view. About halfway through, The Devil transforms into a crime-horror crossover novel, clearly straddling two genres. If you like gritty Southwest crime novels, violent supernatural horror novels, or introspective, lyrical writing, you’ll love this book. It’s all of those things and more. It’s a wildly entertaining and audacious crime-horror novel.
The story starts tragically. Mario, the narrator, and his wife Melissa, who are in Austin, Texas, learn that their young daughter Anita has leukemia. After taking too much time off to help care for his daughter, Mario soon loses his insurance job, and the medical bills begin to pile up. Mario’s friend Brian, a drug dealer, senses his desperation and offers him a cartel job: kill a stranger for $6000. He does it, but the extra money doesn’t solve his problems. His daughter succumbs to cancer, and his wife divorces him after he assaults her. As his life plunges into a tailspin, Mario agrees to kill three more people for Brian. He’s now a common hit man.
Brian introduces Mario to a man named Juanca who plans to rob the Juarez Cartel. After the cartel delivers a drug shipment in Texas, Juanca wants Brian and Mario to help him ambush the truck in the desert on the return trip to Mexico, use a “special weapon” to kill the crew, and take the $2 million in cash. Mario’s and Brian’s cut will be $200,000 each, more money than they’d ever seen before.
Before pulling off the heist, the three men need to go see a man named Vasquez to pick up a special weapon. That’s the key to the job, according to Juanca. During that trip, all kinds of strange things happen: levitating apparitions, amputation (via bolt cutter!), man-eating crocodiles, zombies, demon-possessed witches, and bizarre satanic rituals. Suddenly, the straightforward crime narrative has morphed into something wildly different. Iglesias manages this transition with the skill of a master magician.
As with his previous barrio noir novels, there’s a lot of Spanish in this novel, both Mexican and Puerto Rican. Occasionally, Iglesias offers an English translation of a passage if it’s crucial to understanding what’s going on. But otherwise the Spanish is left untranslated, and readers can gather bits of meaning from the surrounding context. The mix of languages adds to the novel’s authenticity, and I’ve grown to appreciate it more and more. I wish more novels and movies did this; our culture would be richer for it.
Note: On Kindle devices, you can easily translate the Spanish passages to English, a very nice feature.
There are several jarring scenes of violence in The Devil, and Iglesias handles them with style and restraint, providing just enough graphic details to paint the scene, while leaving the rest to the reader’s R-rated imagination. Some GoodReads reviewers obviously disagree, but you can’t please everyone. In the course of the three men’s traumatic journey, Mario’s fragile psyche causes him to experience several surreal hallucinations, and Iglesias playfully renders these scenes in vivid, visceral horror, helping to sustain tension throughout the book.
Although the violence and gore of The Devil has no doubt caught the attention of reviewers, it’s the quiet, introspective moments where Iglesias’s writing achieves poignancy and resonance. After the surviving members of the crew return to Austin, the emptiness of Mario’s life remains:
An absence can be momentarily covered with anything that can grab your attention and keep it for a while. That something becomes a palliative that allows you to temporarily forget about your pain. You get so used to whatever is making your grief, however, that you end up just as fucked as you were before that other thing bleeped so hard on your radar that you were able to shift your attention to it.
The Devil is not without problems. For instance, there’s an obvious flaw in Mario’s characterization: Once he agrees to assassinate strangers for the drug cartel, Mario becomes an irredeemable character, much like the character Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) in the movie The Road to Perdition. It’s a very heavy lift to get readers to sympathize with a mob hit man. Surprisingly, Tom Hanks (and Sam Mendez) managed to overcome that flaw, and so does Iglesias with his lyrical, emotional writing in this remarkable thriller.
The Devil Takes You Home
Gabino Iglesias
Mulholland Books
cool lima bean 