Gabino Iglesias has always loved horror fiction and supernatural stories.
Haunted houses, zombies, werewolves, witches and vampires are like comfort food, not something he finds scary. Real life is much more horrifying than anything he’s read or watched in a film, he said, which is why he included elements of harsh reality in his latest novel, “The Devil Takes You Home.”
“What I find scary and disturbing is knowing that people need insulin and they can’t afford it,” the author and Austin, Texas resident said during a recent phone interview. “Knowing there are parents out there who have two, three or four kids and they can’t afford medical healthcare, that’s terrifying. The fact that people got COVID and died, that is scary. I got COVID just after losing my job and had no insurance, so you get hit with these bills and it’s unrelenting and unforgiving. We’ve built the greatest country in the world and yet, here we are. If you get sick, it’s actually cheaper to die.”
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Iglesias injected a lot of those personal fears into the novel. He tells the story of Mario, a husband and father desperately trying to come up with money to pay for leukemia treatments for his daughter Anita. Mario turns to crime – some brutal and downright gruesome – in an attempt to save his family. Despite some dark incidents in the book, Mario rationalizes his motives by telling himself he’s doing it all for “the right reasons.”
But the guilt eats at him and his faith.
“I think we all have these little negotiations with ourselves on what is good and bad,” he said. “When you’re in a really bad situation and you get desperate, you start convincing yourself that whatever you’re doing, you have an excuse for it, and if you have an excuse, it’s really not that bad. Mario does a lot of mental gymnastics to convince himself that the people he’s murdering deserve it and then it’s a psychological struggle to keep up with the guilt because he was religious when the novel starts and I think he still is through it.”
“You have a sense of right and wrong and you’re playing mental chess to say, ‘Yes, I’m doing horrible things, but these people deserve it.’ So you’re not a killer, you’re more of a holy avenger. Hopefully, readers will feel a little empathy there, because we do all do that to some degree.”
Iglesias grew up in Puerto Rico speaking Spanish. While the book is primarily written in English, some conversations between Mario and other Spanish-speaking characters he meets on his journey from Texas to Mexico to rip off a drug cartel are in Spanish. It was important, he said, to include both languages and that the Spanish portions not be separated by italics.
“I did that for the first time in 2015 with the novel ‘Zero Saints’ and I spoke to my editor at the time and said, ‘If we are going to use italics for the ‘other’ language, I’m not a native English speaker, so you would have to use italics for all the English parts, too,’” he recalled. “It’s not an ‘other’ language. It’s how we talk and how we think and it’s part of our daily lives. I think it was a very important moment in publishing when the italics started to vanish.”
He said he’s faced criticism from some readers because there wasn’t an immediate translation following the conversations in the novel.
“They felt like they were missing something, and my response to that since 2015 is ‘Welcome to our life; this is how we feel,’” he said, referring to those whose first language isn’t English.
Iglesias’ parents encouraged him to go to college. He spent two years in law school and hated it, so he moved on to obtain a master’s degree in journalism. He relocated to Texas in 2008 and landed a job as a full-time journalist and taught college journalism classes at night, but he still wasn’t making enough money. He realized his colleagues were getting paid more and when he inquired about it, he found out it was because they all had doctoral degrees. So he got his Ph.D. in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.
While living in Puerto Rico, he said he didn’t really encounter racism, but after moving to Texas, it was a different story.
“In the Caribbean, everyone was a different color so we don’t even pay attention to that,” he said. “Here, it was ugly. It was a reason for people to get called names and for people to attack others and a reason why sometimes people got shot. It was abuse online and also a reason why some of the jobs I was applying for, I wasn’t getting.”
He said that people would often point out his accent. And even though he was born in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory for well over a century, he said that while applying for jobs, he’d get asked if he needed a sponsor to work in the United States.
“I was like, yeah, no, that’s not how that works, I’m actually fine,” he said with a laugh. “I’d tell them, you may want to talk with your HR people about that.”
Joking aside, he said that the racism, as well as sexism, homophobia and transphobia, he and people close to him have experienced is another scary reality. He admits that he’s taken out his frustrations at racist abuse within the pages of his novels.
“All of that builds up over time,” he said, noting that in 2020 he was writing “The Devil Takes You Home” during the COVID-19 lockdowns and the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. “It was all just bursting at that time and that came out in the novel. You can’t just go punch racists in real life because then you’ll go to jail, so you might as well do it in fiction. It’s like therapy.”
Though he first fell in love with horror fiction by reading works by H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, he said more recently he’s a big fan of award-winning Native American horror writer and fellow Texas native Stephen Graham Jones and his novels, “The Only Good Indians” and “My Heart is a Chainsaw.”
“In those books, the gory, scary stuff happens because of guilt, and if you do the wrong thing, it might come back to haunt you,” he said of Jones’ work.
But the scariest book he’s ever read is Paul Tremblay’s 2015 novel, “A Head Full of Ghosts.”
“It showed me how in reality you can find instances of psychology bringing forth real-life horrors,” he said. “That was unsettling to me in the best way possible. I love the work of Paul Tremblay; he’s one of the best voices in horror fiction and that book just sticks with me.”
Not surprisingly he’s also a big consumer of horror films. Though he had to mull it over for a bit, he eventually landed on a favorite scary movie.
“I have to pick just one,” he asked with a laugh. “OK, then I’ll go with ‘Event Horizon.’ It’s a wonderfully made movie and it’s about two things that have stuck with me. The first is that it’s adaptable horror so everyone sees stuff that affects them personally, so it’s a great vision of hell. For some people, hell might be being tortured alive, and for others it might be a never-ending dinner with your family where you’re constantly being judged. The second thing is that it hinges on a very simple misunderstanding, which I thought was an absolutely brilliant move. So that personal hell and a little bit of a misunderstanding that costs everyone a lot of blood and suffering makes it, maybe, my favorite movie.”
