The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
The rundown: Buried in debt with his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.
The review: I wish very much that I had read the physical book instead of listening to the audiobook. I didn’t love the narrator, and it has a LOT of Spanish, a hefty amount of it untranslated. Certainly more Spanish than any other book I’ve ever read - which I think is wonderful! But I read Spanish much better than I can understand it when it’s spoken, and it bums me out that I wasn’t able to fully enjoy this aspect of the book.
In terms of content, however, The Devil Takes You Home hit just right for me. It is almost nausea-inducing in its graphic violence, but for those who can handle it, the relentless brutality serves its purpose quite well, I think. The book explores the terrible things we are willing to do, the monstrous things we can justify for the sake of survival in a cruelly unfair world. Mario takes his first job as a hitman when the bills from his daughter’s cancer treatments start piling up, the US healthcare system utterly failing this family with no health insurance. Here, the violence (of the main characters, at least) is motivated by their poor circumstances or as a reaction to violence imposed upon them. To me, Iglesias has written a very compelling story about why so many people do crime.
Beyond this, I so enjoyed the setting Iglesias chose, ambling south and west from Austin, Texas to just-over-the-border Mexico in the worst road trip you’ve ever been on. We get sunsets and open roads sprinkled throughout biting commentary on border politics and Latinx identity (Mario is of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage; Iglesias is Puerto Rican). I loved this exploration of the rancid underbelly of my home state.
Goes well with: If you liked this, give S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland a shot, and vice versa.