The Devil Takes You Home is a tormenting tale exploring the essence of evil. With a mixture of mysticism, money, and Santa Muerte, Gabino Iglesias crafts a genre blurring story about the happenings along our southern border. Initially this book asks the reader to contemplate the lengths they would go for their family, but quickly delves into the propensity for violence and cruelty inherent in us all, bubbling under the surface, just waiting for the right circumstances to explode upon the world.
Mario is an average man, dealing with a scenario no one in this life wants to face. A grave diagnosis for his young daughter buries him under a mountain of hospital bills and the inability to pay them off strains his marriage to the breaking point. With no alternative, he reaches out to an acquaintance with questionable morals and sinister connections. Willing to do anything for the right price, Mario takes a job as a hitman, finding that he enjoyed the work more than he should. As his new career takes off, Mario is brought in on a job that will clear him a couple hundred grand for one night of work… if he can survive it.
What makes this such an interesting book is that Iglesias just dips his toes into the paranormal, making the unfolding events that much more believable and terrifying. The cruelty within the pages is haunting, the motives are duplicitous, and the action is heart pounding. I often found myself wondering how I would react in similar scenarios. Contemplating how I would behave when the imaginary societal protections suddenly disappear and we are left dealing with nothing, but the raw animal instincts of our species.
While I will never claim to be smart enough to decipher what story belongs in what fictional subgenre, I don’t see The Devil Takes You Home as a Southern Crime novel as I’ve heard it described. While the underlying themes of class, race, and cultural norms are discussed, this book deserves to be separated and appreciated on its own. If I could, I’d establish a specific category called ‘Southern Border Crime’ and use Iglesias’ writing as the definitive work to compare future novels to. There may already be a particular place within the spectrum of fiction for this book, but no matter where it falls, it deserves to be read and any acclaim it receives.
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Barrington Books
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