Rating:

“Sometimes God is your copilot, but it’s the Devil who takes you home.”

Author: Gabino Iglesias

Mario will do anything to save his daughter. Even if that means killing strangers. With the hospital bills mounting and her treatments becoming increasingly exotic and expensive, there isn’t much choice. What is morality worth, really, if his daughter dies? But die she does, and Mario is left with the bills, a broken marriage, and a tormented soul. With glee, he turns fully to crime and finds out that he’s good at it. Beneath the love of a father was the soul of a killer. But Mario wants his wife back, wants to salvage what was left of his normalcy. So, he takes a final job, hijacking a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. This job will either make him wealthy or leave him dead. He’s not sure that he cares which.

Along for the ride, Mario is joined by Brian – a druggie, dealer, and the organizer of hits who introduced Mario to this criminal world. They’re old friends (sort of) and colleagues. Brian wants the money to go straight because his girlfriend is pregnant. But is that just a story? Who can you trust?

Juanca is a cartel insider with a grudge. He is dangerous and dark, a man who carries surprising depths of intrigue, and he will be Brian and Mario’s guide through this final trip.

The Devil Takes You Home is billed somewhere between a noir story and horror, with elements of both. It’s a mishmash, starting with a Walter White-like story and then delving into something else – too many somethings really. The transition from good-guy taxpayer, never-did-a-thing-wrong to cold killer is unrealistic. Mario has no true compunctions and even enjoys himself. He’s taking revenge, as it were, against the world. Or so he tells us, again and again, but it doesn’t ring true. Despite his fancy prose and insistence that he is complex, Mario falls flat. How is he so far above it all, so much better than the people he works alongside and looks down on, when he is still by their sides, doing the same things? We never see his transition. We never see why he wants revenge or feels justified. We just hear him tell us, in an abbreviated “it’s ok, I’m the good guy and I’ve been pushed to this” fashion and this is no emotive excuse. It rings false or worse, hubristic, this character with godlike narratorial skills and an axe to grind who hides his making from us. It kills the emotion and the character impetus we need to willingly enter the dark side with him and still, at some basic level, like him. We don’t. He’s not real. He’s an archetype speaking judgement, a catalyst stirring the violence, a non-entity used to keep the story going and try to make a point. He talks pretty, but the emotion to back it up is missing.

Image by NestoR019 from Pixabay

Brian and Juanca are more laired and multifaceted, yet they’re also unsympathetic. We don’t really care what drives them, where they hurt, or why. Like Mario, they are all stereotypes, selfish and self-obsessed, unfeeling, incapable of any human kinds of emotion. It rings false. It, indeed, seems like a ploy to make everything more “gritty.”

But, our characters do, sort of, have some morals, weirdly, in places. They are fine with killing, maiming, torturing. But they are not ok with the plight of the brown man (well, Juanca and Mario aren’t), which they ultimately accuse as the necessitating factor behind their crimes (even though Mario owns up to really liking killing.) Again, it doesn’t fit. Mostly because it’s just told to us, no subtly, right between the eyes. People don’t typically speak like that in real life, and their occasional disassociation from the story to make a point makes it progressively more evident that they are characters in a story and not real people. Also . . . they did kind of sacrifice another brown man to a crocodile for fun . . .so, how does THAT fit?

Likewise, we never really see the impact of racism and poverty on their lives. We’re told. All this happened long before the story, and a few flashbacks aren’t enough. We’re being preached at, taught a lesson, but the characters are not living it. We need to see what happened and why to create sympathy, to back them, to understand why they became so ruthless. As it is, we’re clearly aware that we’re in a story that is trying to do some fancy footwork and cover a bit of everything. It’s distancing. The author has a good point to make – so make it through story, through showing, not telling. Characters should never be used as mouthpieces for bigger ideologies and problems, because then they become characters and cease being people, and your point grows from heart-felt to textbook in a second.

And speaking of taking on wayyyyy too much, what is the deal with the weird supernatural and religious imagery here – superstition twined with real monsters and even some zombies. Like, where did that come from? What does it achieve? Why is it accepted and never explained? Does a violent gangster story really need a random zombie? A ritualistic voodoo priestess? A kid being slowly dismembered for “luck.” What is this dark artistry? Just something to freak us out? It’s not working. It’s just random and weird. Why not add a Pegasus streaking through the desert night? These supernatural elements needed to be added to the story in some definitive way or to be removed.

The only truly interesting moment was the twist at the end, which was inevitable and tragic. Quite interesting really. But the extravagant prose, the lecturing characters, and the descent into unrequired madness just makes The Devil Takes You Home a hodge-podge with no driving force. It’s artsy, sure, and overblown. It’s trying too hard to be something unique and different, killing the vibe and leaving the darkness unjustified and ultimately insipid. Kudos for some pretty writing and some of the ideas, but I won’t be back to read further works from Iglesias.

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)