The Devil Takes You Home
by Gabino Iglesias
Summary
Mario's daughter is four when the leukemia is diagnosed, and the novel's opening movement is the American nightmare played straight: the job lost, the insurance gone with it, the bills metastasizing faster than the cancer, until a coworker named Brian offers the only well paid work available to a desperate man, and Mario becomes a hitman. The daughter dies anyway. The marriage follows. What is left of Mario accepts the big job because nothing in him argues back: ride with Brian and Juanca to Ciudad Juárez, intercept a cartel money truck carrying two million dollars.
Iglesias runs the road trip as barrio noir with the spirit world fully awake. The realistic horrors, meth, stash houses, the border's industrial cruelty, share the highway with the other kind: a curandera's rites before the crossing, a child kept in a shed whose gifts the cartels harvest, Mario's dead daughter appearing at the road's edge with warnings he cannot parse, and a heist that goes wrong in ways ballistics cannot explain, the dead not staying where they are put. The Spanish arrives untranslated in the dialogue's natural weave, and the violence is extreme and morally priced, every killing debited against whatever Mario has left.
The betrayals, when they come, are human, which is the book's final position: the devil is real, and optional, and the poverty was the possession all along.
Around three hundred pages, headlong.
Best for readers who want crime and horror fused at the border, grief noir with the supernatural given equal citizenship.
Historical Context & Significance
The Devil Takes You Home won the Bram Stoker Award for 2022 and the Shirley Jackson Award with it, completing Gabino Iglesias's arrival from the small press margins to the front tables: his earlier Coyote Songs and Zero Saints had built the template he named barrio noir, and this, his major house debut, was written in circumstances that mirror its premise, Iglesias losing his teaching job and health insurance in the pandemic's first summer and channeling, by his own account, that fury into Mario.
The bilingual prose became the flashpoint and the flag: untranslated Spanish as a craft decision, defended by the author as how the border actually sounds, taught now as the mode's signature.
Iglesias, a Puerto Rican writer long settled in Austin, doubled as the community's hardest working critic and mentor, review columns, doctoral work on the genre, and the win was received as infrastructure being honored alongside a book; House of Bone and Rain extended the project.