Review: Clunk And Cliché (A Review of House Of Bone And Rain By Gabino Iglesias)

By Hugh Blanton

 

 

As a literary critic I expect my opinions to often be overruled by the public's reading tastes and by awards juries. So it was no surprise to me when Gabino Iglesias's terrible novel The Devil Takes You Home (Mulholland Books, 2022) was showered with awards and was an Amazon Editor's Pick. His most recent novel, House of Bone and Rain, was similarly lauded—it was a Goodreads Choice Award nominee, a Barnes and Noble Best Horror Book, and the New York Times Book Review called it "stunningly visceral." House is similar to Devil in that it doesn't know what it wants to be—a horror novel or crime novel—so Iglesias (and his publisher) call them "genre bending." Genre bending novels are of course not uncommon, but to bend genres into one book takes a level of skill and talent that Iglesias simply does not possess.

 

The group of five that make up the main characters of House—Gabe (our narrator), Bimbo, Xavier, Tavo, and Paul are a tight knit group of friends that Iglesias never tires of letting us know just how tight they are. It's mentioned they regard each other as brothers no less than sixteen times throughout the book and the phrase "If someone fucks with one of us, the fuck with all of us" appears four times. The plot of House revolves around Bimbo's mother being shot and killed as she worked the front door of a club in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Bimbo asks his "brothers" to help him find out who killed her and get revenge. NPR's Weekend Edition host Ayesha Rascoe interviewed Iglesias and she opened up the show with "It's a story straight from the author's own life." A friend of Iglesias did indeed have a mother who was shot at a bar in Puerto Rico and he and their friends vowed to find out who the killers were and get revenge. "We swore," he said. "It's young, dumb men who grew up watching Goodfellas." This is of course a poor attempt to paint Iglesias as a bad ass gangster (in a subsequent interview with Wisconsin Public Radio Iglesias admitted their plans never got past the talk stage, but assures us that he did indeed grow "up in a Latino macho culture").

 

Iglesias displays astonishing naivety in writing about his subjects. In his previous novel a character owned a Smith & Wesson 500 revolver that she was very proud of, exclaiming, "You know why this only holds five bullets in the barrel? Cause it doesn't need six to kill!" Of course anyone with even a glancing familiarity with firearms knows that the bullets are stored in the cylinder, not the barrel. Iglesias does it again in this novel when Bimbo hands Gabe, who has never used a gun before, a revolver to keep with him now that they're going after the bad guys, and Bimbo tells him, “Ah, you have to touch here and here to open the barrel." Now, of course barrels don't need to be opened, so it's difficult to say what he's referring to here. Possibly the cylinder, but why Bimbo says it needs to be touched twice is a bit of a mystery. One can only guess he was referring to the cylinder release latch. Iglesias mentions a few times in House that the police are afraid to go a neighborhood called La Perla, which Iglesias hopes will explain all the open criminal activity taking place there. This is a common trope in B movies and potboilers—in reality police don't fear bad neighborhoods and are eager to stomp criminal ass wherever it may be. They wouldn't make it part of routine patrol of course, but detectives use informants and observation to keep tabs on the criminal activity and arrange busts as needed to keep their careers advancing.

 

Interviewer Ayesha Rascoe remarked that she "really liked" House of Bone and Rain but that she needed to read it alongside Google translate. In fact, there are sixty-six pages in House that contain untranslated Spanish. (The Devil Takes You Home had a hundred and twenty-five.) The surfeit of untranslated language is Iglesias's way of showing off to his monolingual readers (and giving them a shove) and he also uses his main character Gabe as something of a spokesman for all Latinos: "Some people showed up to talk to Bimbo about helping him and his sister, who was also called María because that’s how we Latinos do it." The characters in House switch frequently and arbitrarily between English and Spanish.

 

House is primarily a crime novel and the way Iglesias melds horror into it is clunky. While Gabe, who provides the muscle for the gang, is restraining a man by the neck, Gabe thinks he notices what might be holes on each side of the neck. They are questioning the man trying to get information about the killer of Bimbo's mother, so Gabe doesn't pay much attention to the holes until a few minutes later when he realizes they are gills. Yes, gills, like on a fish. The guy they are torturing is a fish man. And the fish man tells them they are all in big trouble because fish people look out for each other. Gabe and the gang peek out the window and indeed, there is a fish man skulking around. The fish man doesn't come inside to rescue his compatriot, he could be waiting for more backup, the gang speculates (or maybe he's an extra polite fish man who doesn't show up uninvited). The fish man they are torturing gives up the full scoop on the fish men: they live out in the reef near the La Perla beach and nobody knows about them. The reason that nobody knows about these fish men is because the Coast Guard, much like the fearful San Juan police, are afraid to go near the coast of La Perla because of the "dangerous, choppy water near the reef." Iglesias has no fear of insulting reader's intelligences. (In reality the area off the coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico is designated by the US Coast Guard as an Active Patrol Zone.)

 

In The Devil Takes You Home, the main character, Mario, makes such profound utterances as "I knew that death was serious business." Iglesias continues with the hackneyed phrases here: "Murder is an attack on someone's life," "Death very rarely feels right," "For those who bottle things up, tears always feel like blades running down your face." Gabe constantly has shivers going down his spine and the hair on his neck stands up with annoying regularity. Another of Gabe's physical reactions: "A tightness squirmed its way around my insides." It also appears as though a sensitivity reader had combed through House of Bone and Rain: "Tavo had misinterpreted their friendliness and asked one if he could buy him a drink and they called him a slur." Often Iglesias's prose is like he's narrating each and every detail as if he's writing from a movie screen in his mind: "I got up, used the bathroom, and then walked into the kitchen. As soon as I walked in, my mom started talking." Iglesias tries way too hard to let the reader know how much pain Gabe is feeling at all this death around him: "The pain was so big it bled into every thought I had."

 

Our story takes place during the deadly hurricane Maria in September 2017. Iglesias's attempt to let us know how terrifying a hurricane can be is by repeating "the wind roared" over and over. A woman living alone in a small house deals with the hurricane: "Doña Ana got up. She had to close the door or everything would get wet." Iglesias describes hurricanes with a poor mix of realism and mysticism, telling us that people went missing during the hurricanes (no kidding!) and how animals and humans were born with grotesque deformities. The deformed human newborns would be killed by their families, a grave dug in the backyard marked by crosses that neighbors never became suspicious of and legal authorities never became aware of. He also uses the hurricane to take a shot at American colonialism: "Being fucked when you're a small republic is almost understandable, but being fucked while being a colony hurts a little more because it reminds you that colonialism is like being the child of a neglectful parent." (Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of USA, not a colony. It was removed from the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories in 1953 with UN Resolution 748.) Another supernatural event during the hurricane is all the corpses in the morgue moaning and standing up. Not to worry though, they all lie back down and the morgue staff go back to work.

 

Like any revenge story House of Bone and Rain has plenty of shootings, stabbings, and beatings. As our gang is walking down a sidewalk on their way to eat we come across this: "BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!" This is Iglesias again narrating from that movie screen in his mind, unable to translate his visual images into words on a page. Worse yet, the movies that seem to be running in his mind are terrible microbudget B movies. At one point our gang is torturing someone they believe to have information about Bimbo's mom's killer: "Did they kill my mom? Tell me the truth and I won't kill you." as if Bimbo wouldn't judge the veracity of whatever answer he got. (Not even Roger Corman's most hideous scripts would allow a line like that.) We also come across "WHACK!" which we learn in the next sentence is someone being hit in the head with a lug wrench. Iglesias's attempts at building suspense are poor at best. When Gabe is walking to Bimbo's apartment he sees someone on the sidewalk who he thinks is following him: "I took a step forward. If this man was going to kill me, I wanted to look him in the eye and whisper a curse the second I went down." Of course, Gabe is our first person narrator so we already know he isn't going to get killed.

 

House of Bone and Rain winds up with a Scooby Doo-like ending; our avenging gang out on the reef chatting with the fish men, who it turns out aren't such bad guys after all. They're just really pissed off about the white man-induced climate change that destroyed all the beautiful cities they'd built underwater. (Like a good NPR writer, Iglesias puts hot-button issues in his novels—in his last one he used his characters to take shots at Donald Trump.) But credit should be given where it's due: Iglesias's scenes of violence are indeed terrifying and the ending plot twists are unexpected. The repetitiveness and cliches pretty much sink the entire novel though, he can even work two cliches into one sentence: "The hair on the back of my neck stood up despite the stifling heat." Our main character Gabe, after the harrowing experiences he encounters in their vengeance quest, says, "After what we'd been through, I wanted to keep death as far away from me as possible." Which is about how far away readers desiring good stories should keep from Gabino Iglesias novels.

 

 

 

 

 

Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys (Anxiety Press). He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5