The Devil Takes You Home

Gabino Iglesias has become a phenomenon in horror through a lot of hustle and plain hard work. His 2022 novel cemented his reputation as the king of border horror.

This novel follows the fate of Mario, a man broken by debt due to his family’s crushing medical bills. With a failing marriage, he reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, agreeing to do one last job hijacking a cartel’s cash shipment before it can reach Mexico.

Mario reluctantly works with his meth-addicted friend and a cartel insider. To make this dangerous endeavor worse, enter supernatural horrors that shocked me—and I… show more.

From the first page of this paranormal thriller set in the borderland between Texas and Mexico, the story sucked me into Mario’s vortex of medical spending, powerlessness, self-loathing, and grief as he turns to contract killing to try to save his terminally ill child.

A dark heist thriller, the horrifying human violence of drug cartels melds with supernatural terror while the reader roots for Mario, a compelling character who acts in ways contrary to his own values.

I appreciated the story’s authentic dialogue and setting, which provided a window into the challenges of extreme poverty, racism, and lack of social… show more.

Winner of the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards, this adult horror novel is not for the faint of heart.

I highly recommend the audiobook, as Iglesias’ Latin characters use a fair amount of Spanish in dialogue and the audiobook handles this beautifully. You’ll be hooked by the gut-wrenching family struggle in the opening pages that forces the MC to delve into a world that despite how dark and twisted it gets, we still root for him to come out on top.

I was so stunned by the ending, I emailed the author directly to express my shock, and he… show more.

This book is a dark ride into the worst grief a human being can imagine—the loss of a child. Mario loses his four-year-old daughter to illness, and as a complication of his grief, his marriage also falls apart. Debt drives him into further dark places, and Mario takes on a series of unsavory jobs. The ghouls and ghosts in Mario’s life become more and more tactile as the novel progresses. Iglesias’ use of Spanish throughout the novel is brilliant even to the non-Spanish speaker. He welcomes the reader into the darkest corners of the human psyche, places we may later… show more.