THE DEVIL TAKES YOU HOME

A desperate father finds himself drawn into a paranormal underworld.

Faced with a growing stack of medical bills to pay for his daughter’s cancer treatments and prone to hallucinatory visions, Mario contacts Brian, an old meth-head acquaintance, who sets him up with a contract killing. Mario executes the job with unsettling ease but discovers otherworldly worms inhabiting the body of the man he just murdered. This first portent signals strange and nasty things to come for Mario, whose extralegal efforts fail to save the life of his child. When his marriage subsequently falls apart, Mario smokes meth, kills several more people, and agrees to one final assignment: Rob a Mexican cartel. Disturbing supernatural encounters en route to this suicide mission intensify the impossible danger of this unlikely feat, which culminates in monstrous battles with a cartel that is not what it seems. While Iglesias pulls off vivid characterizations (one man’s face is described as “a fistful of sliced ham”) and he threads enough Spanish through the dialogue and narration to appeal to bilingual readers, the story feels stretched and uneven. Less genre-defiant than genre-dysmorphic, the book never quite settles into a storytelling groove and instead cycles between pulse-pounding thriller, diabolical horror, and violent narcoliterature. Nevertheless, readers captivated by the characters’ motivations and the occult pyrotechnics will quickly devour it whole.

A vivid, if unbalanced, supernatural thriller at the U.S–Mexico borderlands.